


next, home

by inlay



Category: Bleach
Genre: Bleach Post-Chapter 686 - Death & Strawberry, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Chapter 686 fix-it, F/M, Minor Character Death, basically taking the canon ending and trying to write it so it actually works, but not compliant with the novel, make no mistake this is an IR fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-10-15 10:26:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 22,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10554774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlay/pseuds/inlay
Summary: Rukia was sitting in his room the first time he opened his eyes after. He does not know if this was a dream, or reality—remembers only that she looked very pale, and that there was a small, black hell butterfly perched on her finger. In this vision, she looked startlingly similar to the girl who used to crouch on his windowsill before school, shiny black shoes and black hair. He watched her for as long as his eyes could stay open, waiting for her to notice him and tell him what was happening. The battle hadn't felt like the deciding, dramatic finale he'd been subconsciously expecting, and he keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.What next?(or, sometimes it takes a couple lifetimes to learn the difference between a love and a soulmate)





	1. first: being a human heart

**Author's Note:**

> well i started writing this pretty much a month after the chapter came out--reeled off a bunch in one sitting, and then forgot about it. it's important to me to finish it though, even if my brain is trying to move on, so I'm doing something i never do: posting it as a wip. 
> 
> i wanted to fix the ending without changing it. prove that i could work with the shit we were given and change it into something that actually respected the characters and who they were. it's not perfect and i skip over tons of plot stuff and side character stuff, but i did my best to clean up and provide character explanation where kubo did not. is it possible to write ichigo and orihime being together in the ending in a way that makes sense with the rest of the 685 chapters? and how do we get them and renji and rukia to where they truly belong?
> 
> @anybody who hates on orihime as a character: don't let the door hit you on the way out. the ending of bleach was as unfair to her as it was to ichigo and rukia. also, i attempt to make kazui and ichika be their own people who are important to the storyline, so if you want to pretend they don't exist, this is not the fic for you
> 
> the first part is ichigo's human life, and the second is what follows. i've got 11k of the whole thing written in total so far, and the end is in sight, so you won't have too long to wait for the end!
> 
> belated as this fic may be, i hope someone enjoys it!

It's his knuckles that hurt the longest after the fight. Weeks in the barracks of the Fourth mean that his ribs and back and arms have been restored to as good as they were when he first stood in front of Yhwach, gripping his sword, but his hands—

His hands seem to take longer.

He lies on the bed with a weight in his chest like an anchor pulling down, and he curls and uncurls his fist, waiting for it to feel like he's not tensed around Zangetsu anymore.

What next, he thinks. What happens next?

He slept for days after the battle, a sleep half induced, and half genuine, and when he wakes, almost too much has happened for him to catch up with. Everyone is focused on re-building, and seems to slip away from him whenever he tries to ask questions. He doesn't know where Aizen is. There are people he thinks are missing, and it doesn't make sense that the Quincy are all gone and dealt with now that Yhwach is. He sees Ishida's shape in the hallway outside his room again and again, but he can't make himself call out to him.

It is a strange recovery, but his friends visit, and slowly, he moves from lying down to sitting up, to standing beside them and hearing about what had happened while he slept. Inoue had been banned from using her powers of healing in order to let her rest. Chad's arm had been broken in several places, and needed a lot of time. Renji came back from the brink of death with the casualness of a cat that had almost slipped from a tree branch, but thought no one had seen it. They do not treat him like a god, the way some of the nurses at the Fourth do, or like he's dying, the way some of the captains and seated officers who visit him do. But they don't quite treat him the same as before.

Rukia was sitting in his room the first time he opened his eyes after. He does not know if this was a dream, or reality—remembers only that she looked very pale, and that there was a small, black hell butterfly perched on her finger. In this vision, she looked startlingly similar to the girl who used to crouch on his windowsill before school, shiny black shoes and black hair. He watched her for as long as his eyes could stay open, waiting for her to notice him and tell him what was happening. The battle hadn't felt like the deciding, dramatic finale he'd been subconsciously expecting, and he keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

What next?

****

He does not remember the conversation he had with Renji before the final battle until Matsumoto's party.

There is a party, because of course there is. Ichigo's never been big on drinking, mostly because he hasn't had much time for it what with the whole, killing hollows for much of his teenage life thing, so he stays mostly on the fringes. Despite that, everyone's faces grow slowly blurry. He has the strange feeling that he does not remember everyone here, or that somehow, again, people are missing. It has been a long time since he saw some of them.

Rukia is crystal clear on the other side of the room, looking long-suffering and much more sensible than some of the other vice-captains dipping drunkenly around her. Ichigo makes to head her way, but stops when Renji gets there first, his shoulders blocking Rukia from view.

Ichigo remembers then that Renji is in love with her.

He's not as stupid as he looks, or maybe fighting Yhwach made him do a lot of growing all at once. He'd suspected back when he was fighting all of Soul Society to save Rukia, but when nothing seemed to happen between Renji and Rukia in all the time afterwards, he'd let his awareness of it sink under the comfortableness of being their friend. But he knows now for sure, with what Renji said to him before the battle—Renji is in love with Rukia.

Ichigo stands half a step away from the wall, his glass sweating in his hand, and he watches them talk. Rukia has to crane her neck to look Renji in the eye, and she gives him this smile sometimes that knocks Ichigo back on his heels even from twenty feet away. The edges of Renji's spiritual pressure go soft around her, and Ichigo can't quite look away from Rukia looking up at him. A door closes in his head so suddenly that he does not catch even a glimpse of what lay beyond it.

He lurches off into the crowd.

Inoue finds him later in the night, and fumblingly tells him first that she wants to kiss him, second that she didn't mean to say that, and third that she loves him. Matsumoto's set up a strobe light that she bought when she was in the Living World, and the lights make Inoue's face look unfamiliar, constantly shifting. She's supposed to be solid, dependable, and he realizes suddenly that he does not know her.

And she does not know him.

He sputters alcohol down his front and Inoue draws back to dab at it with the edge of her sleeve. Her ears are pink, and Ichigo feels intensely uncomfortable, and cowardly for feeling that way. This is something he should face head on. He's always been like this around girls who seem to want something from him, or who wear their sexuality as casually as a sheen of sweat after a battle. Inoue's wristbones are delicate against his chest, over his pounding heart. He remembers the anxiety of having Rukia just sitting on the edge of his bed, years ago now.

So much has changed, and he has to change with it.

He still doesn't mean to kiss back when Inoue tries again, but it happens. She is kind, and just as fumbling as he is, and if he doesn't open his eyes, he doesn't have to see anyone else in the room. They end up in Ichigo's hospital room, and when she undresses, he tells himself to be a man, and doesn't run away from her.

He's such a child in the end. Looking at Renji and Rukia just reinforced it—he's a child, and she's—she's something far beyond reach.

Ichigo and Inoue are both drunk, and she makes the softest sound on earth when he puts his mouth against her neck. They are allowed to be children together.

****

It happens again. Every time it happens, Ichigo does not know how he got there—it seems somehow inconceivable that it's Inoue's bare back under his hands. He keeps feeling like he's watching himself from outside of his own body, like the way Yhwach must have seen the future. He's himself as he pictures himself—a couple years younger, free of any knowledge of Yhwach—and he's seeing a future that doesn't make sense.

Unlike Yhwach, he doesn't have the power to change the future. It keeps happening.

****

“They look up to you,” Rukia tells him. He's at the point of recovery where staying in the hospital any longer seems like vanity, but he does not know how to leave just yet. A group of eleventh company soldiers just challenged him to a fight as he sat with Rukia in the coutryard outside the Fourth, and he snarled until they went away.

“They're bored,” Ichigo says. “And I'm interesting right now.”

She shifts beside him. “They have looked up to you ever since you came for me.”

“They hated me.”

“They hated themselves.”

Ichigo is never certain what he and Rukia are talking about. He always wants to talk to her, but when he does, he finds them dancing around subjects he can't put shape to. It was simple at the beginning, when she lived in his closet and knocked his soul out of his chest daily with the heel of her hand, but nothing is simple now.

“How does everything look the same again?” Ichigo asks. “It's like nothing ever happened.”

He gestures loosely to the buildings around them, the sky. Everything.

“It's like Inoue's powers. All mess...erased, and made like perfect.”

“I'd rather see it heal the traditional way,” Rukia says. “We could use some scars.”

Ichigo grunts.

“It shouldn't be the same. I think we need to make sure it doesn't stay the same.” Rukia says.

“You don't need me for that.”

“Soul Society doesn't change, and neither do you,” she says. “When two unmoving objects meet, there is only one option—one of them has to move. You have always been the one to make them move for us.”

“Us?”

“This is my home. I want to help change it.”

“With Renji?”

Her eyes cut sideways to him.

“It's his home as well.”

“On the hill,” Ichigo says. “It looked like they were starting to build something.”

“Some elders believe the Soukyoku should return.”

He feels a little sick—an old injury twinges, hidden underneath all the fresh ones Yhwach had laid upon him.

“The thing I saved you from?” he says. “What do they need that for?”

“You could stay,” she says. “And help me figure out how to not turn back the clock.”

It feels like home, in the courtyard next to Rukia, with black uniforms whipping around the edge of every corner and the buzz of energy in the air. He misses the home he knows though, his sisters and his friends, even the stupid ones.

What she forgets is that he has changed, once; at fifteen years old, he bent like light around her, and he doesn't know where he fits anymore. She's always been the only thing to change his world. It makes him feel strangely out of control.

He gives her no promises, but her voice, saying “you could stay”, rings in his head long after.

****

When Inoue tells him about the baby, he is not suprised. Maybe he should be, but he is used to outside factors making decisions for him. Taking his friends, his powers, his choice in every matter. Usually he fights it. But he is not a child anymore.

He goes to ask Rukia for advice, feeling sheepish and nervous and ashamed for reasons he can't pinpoint—catches her standing at the window in her room with Renji, his hand on her back. Renji sees him, and Rukia does not, even though he knows she can sense his reiatsu. Ichigo leaves without saying a word.

They return to the living world and get married.

Him and Inoue, not anyone else. It's alright. He's confused about it too.

She tells him he does not have to, that she doesn't expect him to, even that she doesn't want him to if it's not what's in his heart. She can be fierce when she wants to, and it makes Ichigo regret all the times his gaze skipped over her in the past, all the times he only half-listened.

Inoue deserves a good lie, and so he tells her he wants to.

This is the other shoe dropping, and he is paralyzed by it.

****

Kazui is a miracle. Ichigo loves like he didn't know he could, just holding him for the first time. He's afraid as well, monstrously so—has the feeling of wanting to lock away a prized posession, take it from his hands so he cannot hurt it. It's an instinct so different from his usual desire to gather everything he loves in one hand and fight for it with the other, that he can barely stand with it; he is unfamiliar to himself. Rukia was wrong about his steadfastedness, and he hates it. He passes the baby in his arms to Yuzu and goes to the only other person who knows how he is feeling.

Orihime's hand is sweaty in his, and she squeezes gratefully.

“I am definitely not as brave as you,” Ichigo tells her. It feels like he's never seen her properly before.

“We both know that's not true,” she says. “He's beautiful, isn't he?”

Ichigo kisses her forehead and agrees.

He is afraid all day that Yhwach will appear and steal this from him—he has not forgotten the ominous promise that he will come when Ichigo is most happy. This feels like it could be that moment. His son has been born—this should be the moment.

Yhwach does not show up. Ichigo's relief tastes a little bit like shame.

****

He forgets that she's Orihime now sometimes. He forgets a lot. Sometimes she goes to call him and he sees the “Kurosaki-kun” on her lips, remembers hearing it like a sick mantra when there was blood in his eyes and Ulquiorra staring down at him. He can see a pleased, uncertain light on her face every time she calls him Ichigo, like it's a victory somehow. Every time he doesn't call her Inoue, it feels a little like he's insulting her, like he took something from her.

She's happy though, and he gets used to it.

****

Rukia and Renji get married too, and when Ichigo looks back on it, he can't remember if it was before or after he married Inoue. It seems monumentally important, because surely, even with a baby, he wouldn't've—if Rukia and Renji hadn't been tied together so closely yet, Ichigo wouldn't've—

But he did and they did and it's happened now, all of it. This is what happens next.

He tells himself it is all because Renji was in love with Rukia, not because he is a coward.

****

And then, slowly, he falls in love himself.

Of course he does. Orihime is a glowing sun in the muddle his life has become, and he can't help but lean into her glow eventually. At first he thinks it's Kazui—that seeing her with him makes her into something bigger in his head, but after a couple years he knows it's just her. It's a soft love, not something he could've expected from himself, not something he thinks he would've felt if circumstance hadn't put them so close together, but any regret fades away more with each passing year, until he's no longer surprised by her name on his mouth, no longer picturing anyone else in her place.

There are other things he regrets, like the directionless feel of his life and the way his friends seem to have drifted to different corners of existence, but he does not regret Orihime.

He wakes up with his power gone choked in his human skin sometimes, begging to be knocked out by a gloved hand, but he breathes until the feeling passes. His knuckles don't hurt anymore, but sometimes he wants them to. Sometimes he sits awake at night, watching the moon.

He's got a son though, and he's human. That's what he's picked.

****

He dreams of a woman all in white; the air is so cold it pulls the blood up just under his skin.

He knows who he is in his dreams.

****

“Why didn't you come back?”

Renji smokes when he visits Ichigo. He says it doesn't matter if it kills him since he's already dead. They stand outside the clinic that used to belong to Isshin. Both Ichigo and Ishida were predictable in taking after their fathers.

Ichigo doesn't say anything, and Renji blows out a puff of smoke.

“There were a lot of seated positions vacant after everything went down,” he says. “I think she thought we were all going to be vice captains together.”

It's been five years.

“How's your daughter?” Ichigo asks.

Renji looks at him. “Ichika?”

“Unless you've got another one kicking around I don't know about,” Ichigo says.

“You never say her name,” Renji says.

Ichigo shrugs. “Seems too much like egotism.”

“You know it was my idea, right? She agreed to it, but I thought of it.”

Inside, Ichigo can hear Rukia and Orihime laughing together. Rukia's voice reminds him of the pull of moonlight. He likes seeing them together, his wife and Rukia, but it hurts a little, like someone pressing on an old bruise.

“Why haven't I met her?” he asks. “Kazui's about her age.”

“Maybe you'd meet her if you came to visit us once in a while,” Renji says. “You know Inoue would come with you.”

“Kurosaki.”

“What?”

“She's a Kurosaki now.”

Renji stubs his cigarette on the ground. “Right. If you're going to be stupid about Soul Society, are you at least going to do something about the crazy power your kid's got?”

Ichigo goes still.

“You have noticed, haven't you? He's been leaking spiritual pressure everywhere. Would've been dead a hundred times over from hollows if we hadn't been watching over this place.”

“You've been doing what?”

“With your head in the sand, who do you think's been making sure no one comes looking for the saviour of the free world, or whatever you are?”

Ichigo can see Rukia through the window, and she's got her chin in her hands, watching Orihime talk at great speed about something, probably something ridiculous. She looks fond, and Ichigo knows how she feels.

“I haven't seen her anywhere,” he says.

“Anyone ever tell you you've got tunnel vision?” Renji says. “I'm your friend too, and we've got some clout in that place. We made sure better warriors than Afro-san got posted here.”

“Thank you,” says Ichigo.

“Wouldn't need to if you weren't keeping it all locked up.”

Ichigo sighs, ignores him.

“She'd be happy to see you back in Soul Society.”

Ichigo has no idea which “she” they're talking about anymore.

“Are they still rebuilding the Soukyoku?” he asks.

Renji's face twists.

“Not that much clout then,” Ichigo says.

Orihime calls his name from inside, and says that Ishida's on the phone and wants to talk to him. Ichigo doubts that very much. Ishida calls to hear Orihime's voice and for little else. Ichigo misses him nonetheless.

Ichigo goes inside. Renji remains on the sidewalk for a while longer.

****

The day of Rukia's captain ceremony, the ghost of Yhwach reappears and is crushed under Kazui's tiny fist.

Ichigo and Rukia sit on the roof after Chad's match is over, Ichigo gravitating there first, and her following. Renji saw them go, but did not comment. Orihime was still talking to the officers from Soul Society who came to investigate further and make sure all of Yhwach's reiatsu was truly gone.

“Why today?” Rukia asks.

“I don't know,” Ichigo says.

“I thought it was meant to be your happiness that he fixated on the most,” Rukia says. “This day is special only to me.”

“Not only,” Ichigo says.

She gives him a look. He resists the urge to bluster; he is an adult now.

“I'm proud of Chad,” he says. “He's worked hard to be as good as he is.”

“He won quite handily,” Rukia says.

“I knew he would.”

They are silent for a long moment. He thinks briefly about asking her if she dreams too—if he is there.

“We are tied together,” Rukia says. “Since I gave you my powers, we have been tied. Perhaps he mistakes my happiness for yours. Perhaps it appears the same to his eyes.”

Ichigo had woken up content that morning, with Orihime warm beside him and Kazui yelling vaguely in the hallway. The happiness had grown throughout the day as he thought of Chad's upcoming match and Rukia's captain ceremony—she had instructed none of them to attend, as she wanted to look professional in front of the other captains and believed for some reason that the gang being there would distract her. Even if he wasn't there, Ichigo had known how happy she would be, and he'd known that he would see her later in the day. Ichigo had been happy today, and if Yhwach sees his and Rukia's happiness as the same, perhaps he is not so far off.

“Maybe,” Ichigo says.

“It's done though,” Rukia says. “And that's what matters.”

“How did he do it?” He's open now, unable to hold it in with only the sky and Rukia there to hear it. Belated fear chokes him; he hides his face. “It took me and Ishida and fucking Aizen to take down Yhwach, and Kazui just—”

“He is your son—of course he can do extraordinary things.”

He can't bring his face out of his hands.

“Get up.”

He doesn't respond.

“Ichigo.”

She pulls his hands away from his face. It is not gentle. She is crouched before him, and with the light of the moon like soft chalk around her head, her hair almost looks white.

“Do I need to throw you in front of a Hollow to remind you who you are?”

“No,” Ichigo says. Her fingers are biting into his palms—it feels like she is gripping a sword, not his hands, and that is what makes the contact permissable. He will let himself have this. “I'm alright.”

“Would you like me to get Orihime?”

“No.”

They sit, still connected. It is only for the space of a dream.

“Is Kazui in danger?” Ichigo asks.

“We will not let him be,” she says.

He tries to feel relieved that it's over, that it's done, but the shadow of Yhwach remains in his head.

****

Ichigo teaches Kazui the bare minimum of being a shinigami, only so he can try to control his spiritual pressure. It feels too much like relapsing into an addiction, allowing himself to be in his shinigami form too long, too much like becoming the boy he still pictures himself as again. He teaches Kazui very little, and leaves the rest to Rukia and Renji and Ichika when they visit. They start visiting more as the kids get older. Ichika looks like a perfect hybrid of her parents, unlike Kazui, who is all Orihime, and it's intensely strange to see them standing next to each other.

Kazui likes his lessons, but his favourite honourary aunt is still Tatsuki, who makes him laugh like no one can, not even Ichika.

Kazui is excited about his shinigami powers, and it makes Ichigo feel strangely distant—he chose to put those aside for the sake of Orihime and this child, and here he is, burning up with power and possibility. Ichigo is positively shrivelled next to him, and he doesn't like feeling that way around his son.

He doesn't know him very well, at the end of the day.

He overhears Orihime speaking to Kazui in his room once, after Rukia and Renji and Ichika had left from their most recent visit. Kazui is complaining about Ichigo not allowing him to go to Soul Society, voice pitched whiny and creaking. He is fourteen years old, one year younger than Ichigo was when he met Rukia.

“Is this really about your father,” Orihime says, soft and measured. “Or is it about Ichika?”

Kazui blusters. “She's my friend. No one around here gets this stuff like she does, because they're all human.”

“You're human too,” Orihime says. “That's why you're feeling this strongly. It's okay.”

Kazui's voice is quiet then. “She's really cool.”

“I always thought this might happen,” Orihime says. “Kurosakis have a tendency to fall for Kuchikis.”

Ichigo flattens himself to the wall in the hallway and tries to breathe.

Orihime reports cheerfully to him later that Kazui has got his first crush, and isn't it darling. Her hands shake a little on the knife as she's cutting carrots for dinner, and she nicks her finger. Ichigo kisses it, and then kisses her mouth, trying to take all the pain away. He does not know how to tell her he loves her in any louder way. It almost feels like it works.

Kazui gets over his crush. Just another way he is different from his father.

****

Years go by and take more and more from Ichigo, even as they give to Kazui. He sheds childhood with an ease that leaves Ichigo envious, and he tamps down his power once he realizes he has no desire for battle, throwing himself instead into study and travel. He wants to be an archaeologist, and he has his mother's kindness and his father's stubbornness—just the right things to carry him through. He leaves them behind. Visits a lot, but still. Leaves them behind. Ichigo had never anticipated that this kind of grief came with being a parent. He thought he'd already had his fair share of grief over leaving people or being left.

He misses his own father a lot, and tries not to think on it. Of the many unaccounted for after the final battle concluded, he leaves the biggest scar.

Ichigo and Rukia fight one night a couple days past his forty-fifth birthday. Orihime has gone to visit some of her old school friends, and Renji is apparently at meetings, so he does not come. It's raining when Rukia comes in through the window—it's rained a lot in Karakura in the past twenty-seven years.

She's not in her gigai, but her full shinigami outfit, captain coat and all. Ichigo feels insignificant in a way he hasn't around her since the day they met.

They argue about a captain seat left empty in Soul Society and Ikkaku refusing to accept it—how they have no other candidates right now. Ichigo asks if it's always Soul Society business that brings her to his house, if she's just been checking up on him all these years or if she truly wants his company. She throws back that he is not the man she knew if he can say that to her. He is electrified just by the argument alone, and has the strange sense that he wants to make her angry enough to hit him. Aging is different in Soul Society, and she looks the same, just with longer hair. He has lines at his eyes and a persistent click in his jaw.

She does hit him eventually—on the chest with a familiar glove in hand, dragging him out.

“If it is a fight you want,” she says. “Then do it as yourself.”

They fight, and he has not forgotten as much as he thought. They pivot in the air above his house, with rain smashing down around them, and droplets seem to hover when their swords clash. Ichigo feels fiercely alive. She laughs when she beats him, and Ichigo can't even be grumpy about it because he's looking at her smile and he's fifteen years old again, thinking “I remember now, why I wanted to save you so much”.

“I understood when you wanted to stay in Soul Society,” he says when they sit together on the roof afterwards, Zangetsu and Sode no Shirayuki stabbed carelessly into the shingles besides them.

“That was a different time and situation,” Rukia says. “And you forget that I watched you when you had lost your powers, and I know how hard that was, how stifled you felt.”

“I don't feel stifled.”

“No, because you have your family. Except Kazui is a man now, and Orihime—she has a place in Soul Society too.”

“She doesn't,” Ichigo says. “She isn't a shinigami, and she's not dead. I'm not dead.”

“Then stop acting like you are!”

He goes still, breathing in short, sharp pants, like a dog. The rain has turned into a fine mist, making the air hazy between them. He wonders at how strange it is to feel so close to her and yet so far apart. When did their roads diverge so much?

“There is another candidate,” Rukia tells him. “But he has risen too fast through the ranks, and is the kind of rich that even my brother cannot compare with. I do not like to think of the era someone like him in power could help usher in.”

“When I met your brother, he was the kind of person you wouldn't want in power, and look at him now.”

“Was that a compliment for Nii-sama?” Rukia says, cracking a smile. “I'll be sure to pass it along.”

“I wouldn't want to give him a heart attack. He must be getting on.”

“Compared to you, I'm sure he is, but he's got time left. There is still much time left.”

“I know,” Ichigo says, annoyed. “I am so much younger than all of you. Practically still a child.”

“That is not what I meant,” Rukia says quietly.

At each stage in his life, Ichigo has wanted something different from Rukia. What he wants now is to be equals, to stand on the same footing and talk without feeling like he's being stupid. Half of his human life is gone, and yet he still feels too young for her.

“Nii-sama was the kind of person you wouldn't want in power until he met you,” Rukia says. “You changed him. You changed me and that place, and I just want to see you do what you were meant to.”

“And what exactly am I meant to do?”

She throws her hands up. “I cannot make your life for you, Ichigo. But I have felt, since the moment I met you, that you and I were meant to...to change things. That we were meant to shake the world.”

“Ambitious,” Ichigo says. “You're not going to turn into another Aizen, are you?”

She sees through him, as she always does. “He did not do this to us, Ichigo. We engineered our own meeting, not him, and we have chosen every step of the way to remain together.” She draws in a deep breath. “To be nakama.”

“That hasn't changed,” Ichigo says.

“Has it?” Rukia says.

“So this is just a roundabout way of saying you miss me? A bit sappy, isn't it?”

“Tell me you're happy like this.”

Ichigo hesitates. Her leg on the roof is a foot from his own. The boy he was once would have been restless and needy just from sitting here with her, too stupid to catalogue everything his body was trying to tell him. His shihakusho fits more comfortably than jeans ever did.

He was afraid of happiness for ten years—afraid that it could be taken from him so easily. He doesn't know how many choices he made were affected by that fear. Yhwach is gone now though, has been for years.

“I am happy,” he says truthfully. “Not all the time, but I am happy enough. If you are actually worried about this other candidate, I can come and beat him up though.”

She smiles. “That won't be necessary. Renji is already advising everyone in charge of captain selection to not aid this man's ascension. I've even provided him with notes.”

“I hope you didn't include drawings.”

“Excuse me!”

She shoves him, and he lets the force of it slam him back into the roof. Dazed and grinning, he stares up at the night sky. He's not sure when it stopped, but there's no rain anymore, and the stars are clear and bright.

“You are shit at drawing,” he says happily.

“Do you want me to challenge you to another duel?”

“Any time, Rukia, any time.”

“You'll regret saying that.”

“I don't think I will.”

They are comfortable in silence for a moment longer, and then her face appears over his, cutting a moon-sized hole in the sky.

“If you would like to see through this business of being human,” she says. “There is time. We will all still be here when you are done.”

A sharp swell of gratitude pushes in his chest.

“Don't let Soul Society fall until I get there,” he says.

“Never.”

“And don't miss me too much.”

She storms off the roof in a whirl of black fabric, dazzling.

“I am never speaking to you again!” she calls behind her. “Making me say such foolish things. Remember your place, boy!”

He remembers a rainy night and Rukia screaming for him from the circle of Renji's arms. He remembers lying in a lake of his own blood and Rukia looking back at him with tears in her eyes before following her brother through the gate. He remembers that there is time still, and he races after her for one more contest.

****

He and Orihime travel the world together, sometimes with Tatsuki, who owns a sailboat and is frightfully good with it. Orihime makes terribly bizarre food and he eats it anyway. She takes up an interest in researching a specific type of pottery glazing used in feudal Japan and hides it from him at first, apparently thinking it a betrayal of the person he knows her as. He is both excited for her and relieved when he finds out—she'd done so well in school and he'd been worried he made her give up everything else in life when she decided to be a stay at home mother. But there is time for them still to become better people to each other. She gets a degree. He writes some books, and Rukia asks for extra copies to bring to their friends in Soul Society.

The humans grow old and the shinigami wait. Ichigo never stops dreaming of the woman in white.

Chad is the first of them to go. After his boxing took a toll on him that he couldn't quite describe to Ichigo—something about getting into it for the wrong reasons, and not feeling like himself—he went into music, and then humanitarian work. He gets sick not when he's abroad, but when he's back home in between trips. It's cancer, because nothing short of that could've taken Sado Yasutora down, and he outlives the doctors' expectations by three years. His husband, Akihiro, who he met in America at a fundraiser for a charity Chad worked with, stays by his side the entire time, and knows who to notify when it looks like the end. Chad is seventy-one when he dies, and it is the first time in decades that all six of them have been in the same room; even Ishida comes.

It is Ishida who is next, and Ichigo doesn't mean to think of it as a countdown, but he does. Ishida sees it as a contest, because even though he's not remembering things quite correctly at eighty-nine, he still glares at Ichigo from his bed in the hospital and says, “This doesn't mean you've won, Kurosaki.” There is no husband or wife at his side because he never married, although Ichigo knows there were people of all genders for him throughout the years, especially after he very suddenly left the medical practice to become a fashion designer. When they come to see him, he calls Orihime “Inoue”, and neither Orihime or Ichigo correct him.

“Will he go to Soul Society?” Ichigo asks Rukia in the hallway. “Is he allowed there?”

She gives him a withering look. “If he was not, we would all punch a hole in the walls of Seireitei until he could climb through.”

“I'm just looking forward to him finding his way out of Rukongai and assassinating Mayuri to take his place as captain,” Renji says. “It might take a while, but it's gonna be great.”

They haven't seen Chad since his soul went to Rukongai, but no one is worried. Chad makes family fast, and if there are any orphans suffering there the way Rukia and Renji did as children, he is the best thing for them.

Ichigo and Orihime are the last, even of the rest of their friends. Tatsuki dies a year before they do, and her death does something to Orihime that Ichigo cannot pull her out of. Kazui comes home to take care of them, which Ichigo finds kind and infuriating. His power still feels young in his chest—it is only the body that is old. In spirit form, he knows he could move as easily as the day he struck down Yhwach, stand evenly beside his son, but it is not fair to Orihime if he did.

He wakes up on a Wednesday knowing that it is going to be his last. He can feel Rukia and Renji's prescence downstairs, and knows they have come because they know. They are keeping their distance for now, and he is grateful. Orihime's hand is warm on his chest, frail.

“Ichigo,” she says, with difficulty.

“It'll be alright,” he says.

“I know,” she replies. “There is something I need to say to you.”

She is so beautiful. He wonders that it took him so long to see it.

“When I went to Hueco Mundo to keep the rest of you safe, I said goodbye to you when you weren't awake to hear it,” she says. “And I told you that if I had five lifetimes, I would love you in every one, no matter what else changed.”

With great difficulty, he raises her hand to his mouth and kisses it. Both his mouth and her skin are like paper now.

“I wasn't lying,” she continues. “But I've found that one lifetime is enough for me. I will not hold you to any more.”

Appalled, Ichigo says, “I won't stop loving you in the next.”

“No,” she says. “It's not in you to do so. After all, you never stopped loving her.”

There is nothing he can say to that except her name. He says it twice more when she does not answer, afraid she has gone on ahead of him and already passed.

“It's selfishness on my part as well,” she says finally. “We can be new things to ourselves, and to everyone we love in this next lifetime.”

“I love you,” says Ichigo, and means it more than he ever has. “'Till the end.”

“'Till the end,” she agrees, and takes his hand.

They do not die so much as slip out of their bodies into spirit form. They appear young again—not as young as when they had met, but somewhere solidly around their late twenties, and Orihime smiles at him, as dazzling as five minutes ago, when she was ninety-five and wrinkled. They let go of each others' hands as Rukia comes in. She kisses Orihime on the forehead before she brings her sword hilt down and sends her first, in a burst of light. There are tears in her eyes when she turns to Ichigo.

“Happy to see me?” Ichigo tries to joke. His voice sounds creaky, like he has forgotten how not to be old. “Or sad you've got to put up with me now?”

“Happy for myself,” she says. “But sad for Kazui. Sometimes I felt like he was my son too.”

Ichigo's breath gets stuck in his throat, but it's alright; he doesn't need to breathe now.

“I will visit him,” he says. “As much as he wants me to.”

“It was a good life?”

He thinks back on all the mistakes he made, his initial misery and then the climb out of it into where he is now. He thinks of the wrinkled body on the bed behind him and the years he spent inside it; thinks that the distance between him and Rukia is smaller now.

“Yes,” he says. “The best.”

“The next one will be better,” she says, and brings her sword down.

****

_Welcome home, Ichigo._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> yes, the voice at the end is zangetsu, and also, yes, i made as many of the characters queer as possible. ichigo is also probably hella bi, it's just that the loves of his life have been women.
> 
> more coming soon! ichigo and rukia in soul society! plot! danger! emotional times!


	2. second: cocooning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> writing ichigo's death is becoming much longer than ichigo's life, so i'm splitting it up into smaller chapters so that at least something will be posted while i'm working on stuff farther down the line! hopefully the next chapter won't take so long to come.

It takes him two days to find his way out of Rukongai, and he politely knocks on the door of Seireitei until they open it for him. Or, as legend tells it later, he shattered the door in one strike and strode on in. Whichever story is told, the next part is the same: that Captain Kuchiki Rukia is waiting for him just inside, with her husband beside her.

“Stop swinging that ridiculous thing around,” she says. “You're going to hurt someone.”

He hasn't smiled like this in seventy-eight years.

****

Ichigo goes to school and is a terrible student. Rukia tutors him in kido, and he singlehandedly sets most of the Kuchiki gardens on fire.

“You need to learn to control your blast zone!” she roars. 

“You need to learn how to teach better!” he yells back. 

He does not pass the first time, despite his overwhelming power, and is told he needs to repeat a year to get himself in check before he can graduate. Rukia finds him on top of Soukyoku hill, ramming Zangetsu halfheartedly into the side of the new execution pole.

“It is not worth it,” she says. 

“I tore this thing apart when I was a kid,” he says. He does not look at her. “I beat your brother on this hill, a fucking captain, and I can't even pass shinigami school?”

“We will tear it down again,” Rukia says. “This time I will be at your side, not in your arms like a sack of potatoes. You will pass next year.”

He lets his sword fall to his side.

“You weren't that heavy,” he says at length. “You were talking to me a couple decades ago like I could just walk in and be a captain.”

“The Captain Commander said that you could be a seated officer in a company of your choice the second you arrived here,” she asks. “I suggested you attend the academy because I assumed you wanted to prove your spot here. Was I wrong?”

He points his sword at her. “Don't be a smartass.”

“Hard not to,” she says, preening. “When I am the smartest person on this hill.”

They scuffle a bit, and finally settle, sprawled on the ground with their swords overlapping in the space between them. The air is brisk up on the hill, the sky a peerless blue up above, as if it had never been torn apart by hollow hands.

“How can you stand to even be up here?” he asks. “Knowing they built it again?”

“Because it has not been used since it has been built, and all those who matter are against it,” she says. “Including the Captain Commander. We need only to gain a few more voices among the captain-class shinigami ranks and drown out the nobles who still impose their will. We can change it. The system. All of it.”

“Appoint more shinigami in Rukongai,” Ichigo says quietly. “There's not enough in the outer regions. Renji told me about your childhood—you guys deserved to be protected too.”

“Balance between here and the living plane means there must be some pain on both sides,” Rukia says. 

“I don't believe that,” says Ichigo. “And I don't think you do either.”

When he turns his head, she's already looking at him, and she's smiling in this heart-stopping way. He feels his mouth twitch in response—not understanding, but aching to follow her example anyway.

“You called it the human world,” she says. 

“It is.”

“I know. I just—it's good that you're getting used to it here, is all.” She sits up, taking her smile with her. “Maybe one day you'll think of it as home here.”

He stares at her small back, straight and powerful despite the shadow of the execution pole falling across her. Orihime flashes across his mind, along with a tiny pang of guilt, but it is nothing like the way he'd felt before Kazui was born, so wrong and out of place. He remembers his final conversation with her:  _I will not hold you to any more._

“I've thought of this as home for a while,” he says. “I've just been away from it 'till now.”

****

Being in Soul Society makes him feel intensely alive, soaking up the power that is running in the air everywhere. He's around friends he hasn't seen in years, and he can feel Rukia's reiatsu no matter where he is in the Seireitei. If he stands at the edges, and closes his eyes, he can sense Orihime and Chad and Ishida as well. They have made no attempt to come up to Seireitei, so he decides to give them time. They have so much of it now.

Orihime and Ishida's reiatsu are often quite close.

Ichigo passes and moves up the ranks quickly. Years pour by like grains of sand in an hourglass, and he wonders if his own human life moved so quickly for Rukia—if she blinked and he was old suddenly, too fragile to fight with her. It explains why she and Renji visited so infrequently at least. Ichigo visits Kazui in the human world, and he seems to have twice the lines on his face every time Ichigo sees him. Kazui asks after his mother, and Ichigo always has to respond that he does not know where she is, only that she is doing well there. It's not a lie, because he thinks he would feel it if something bad happened to her. He remembers all too well how it felt in Hueco Mundo, feeling first Chad, and then Rukia fall.

“Ichika, then,” Kazui asks. “I bet she still looks young.”

“It would probably look weird to anyone here if you still had a crush on her,” Ichigo says, feeling an old, secondhand amusement about it, pulled from Orihime. Ichika is in her father's division—Squad 7, which Renji had assumed command of after Iba passed away on a mission to Hueco Mundo—and is probably going to rise to a seated position soon. Renji is ostentatiously proud, Rukia subtly so. 

“Well, no one here would believe that you're my dad,” Kazui shoots back. “I doubt a young girlfriend would be the most unbelievable thing.”

Ichigo frowns. “You don't still—”

“Dad, I haven't seen her in decades, and I was a kid. No, of course I don't.”

They're silent for a moment. For all that Ichigo has resented Kazui's powers in the past, now all he can think of is convincing Kazui to shed his body for an hour or two to run with him across the rooftops, the way Ichigo should have when Kazui was young.

“Rukia and Uncle Renji,” Kazui says, clusmy. “You see them a lot though, right?”

Ichigo grunts.

“Do you still—”

Kazui breaks off, less like he doesn't know the end of the sentence and more like he doesn't know if he can say it. Ichigo raises an eyebrow, challenging.

“I miss them too,” Kazui says finally. “You should bring them with you next time you visit.”

Ichigo promises, and although Renji's busy at the time of his next visit, Rukia comes, and she and Kazui laugh and talk together for what feels like hours.

Rukia is around every corner now—it's no surprise that he ends up in thirteenth company. They've always been drawn together.

Time moves differently in Soul Society, it's true, but even though years are piling up heavy on his back, the sense of purposelessness from his human life is gone. There's an urgency here, a feeling that there's something he's working towards, something like the shape of Rukia's shadow against the execution pole on the dusty ground.

He has always worked best with a goal.

****

The day after he becomes Rukia's vice-captain, he tells her about his mother. He sits with her on a hill that overlooks Rukongai, and rips blades of grass out of the ground as he describes the way she kept them all together, the way he loved her like breathing, the way he'd thought her blood on his face was just rain at first. Rukia listens, just like she said she would all those years ago, and he is grateful with every minute for her unmoving presence at his side.

She has always been the steadfast one, not him.

She tells him the full story about a man called Kaien, and his relation to Ichigo. He can see in her face when she speaks of him that her words do not fully encompass everything he meant to her. She's hiding it behind terms like “admiration”, but Ichigo knows her, and he's not as naive as he once was to fail to recognize love. She tells him that he looks a lot like Kaien, and that she was thrown by it at first. Ichigo tries not to feel like an imposter sitting beside her, wearing the mask of a dead man.

“Am I just a reminder?” he asks, bitter, and trying to hide it.

“Ichigo, no,” she says. “I know who you are. I put Kaien to rest in Hueco Mundo when I faced the Espada Aeronierro and almost lost myself. I do not see him where he isn't anymore.”

“And what am I?” he asks. 

She opens her mouth to speak, and then closes it with a puzzled cock of her head. It is as if she has been cut off by an unheard voice.

“What?” Ichigo prompts. 

“I was going to say you are my best friend,” she says. “But that has always been Renji. You are something else.”

She does not offer anything more and Ichigo doesn't ask further. His whole body feels like a heartbeat, and he holds very still, trying to slow down the frantic pace of it. He has never had full control over his body when Rukia is near him, and he's starting to glimpse the truth of that, somewhere just past the edge of the word “nakama”.

Words are fluttering in the back of his throat like a trapped bird—he holds them in. He can't.

****

He's seen Rukia and Renji kiss before—of course he has. On the cheek, on the forehead, quick on the mouth, in parting and in casual joy. But he's never seen them act together the way he knows they must when they're alone. They keep it to themselves, which he figures is a very Kuchiki thing to do, and is something he's sickly, shamefully grateful for.

But the way they look at each other.

Rukia and Renji make sense in a way that used to cause Ichigo to feel strangely out of place. Over his human lifespan he got accustomed to it—watching the way they searched out each others' gaze, smiled identical grins, stood taller when together. They are both—in their own separate ways—his greatest allies, and they are more when they're with each other than when they're not.

Ichigo is lucky to have them both in his life and in his death. He can handle seeing them together now, even without Orihime's warmth at his side. He can.

****

Kazui outlives Ichigo's human lifespan by six years, and Ichigo expects smugness when he and Rukia comes to pick him up. Instead, he's just standing next to his hospital bed, watching Jamie, his partner, cry softly next to the body Kazui's chained to. Ichigo stops just within the door, stricken. He'd forgotten somehow, about the cruelties of human life, and his excitement at seeing Kazui young and vital again is drained all at once.

Rukia is the one who goes to Kazui, and she doesn't even stiffen all that much when he sweeps her off her feet into a hug. Kazui has always shared Orihime's exuberance for physical contact.

“Will they be alright without me?” he asks. 

He's no longer looking at Jamie, but it's clear who he's referring to. More people have entered the room—some nurses, and Jamie's younger sister, who Ichigo met once under the guise of being one of Kazui's students during one of the visits where he bothered with a gigai. Ichigo steps forward and puts his hand on Kazui's shoulder as Jamie's sister does the same to them.

“They're strong,” Rukia says. “And so are you.”

The three of them take a minute to watch the scene of doctors bustling and Jamie being comforted, hunched over almost as old and brittle as Kazui was himself five minutes ago.

“Will I see them when they come to Soul Society?” Kazui asks. 

“You've got more power than even your Dad,” Rukia says. “If you want to seek them out, I'm sure you'll be able to sense and find them. It may take some work, but you could do it.”

Kazui glances at Ichigo.

“Can I find Mom?”

“Yeah. Sure,” Ichigo says, and tries not to start explaining why Orihime wasn't there with them to pick up Kazui. Somehow, “she's not a shinigami” and “I haven't seen her since we died” don't seem like adequate excuses right now. “She'd love to see you.” 

Kazui's gaze is not accusing though. He looks at Jamie one last time, lingering on their face.

“Will I feel the same about them now that I'm dead?”

Rukia breathes out a slow breath next to Ichigo, and he does not look at her.

“You may,” Rukia says. “Or you may not. Not every love you have will be your soulmate, but it doesn't mean it wasn't real.”

Kazui nods, and turns away with determination. He wraps a hand around the chain protruding out of his chest and gives it a little tug.

“I think I'm ready to get rid of this then.”

Ichigo brings his sword hilt down, and brings his son into his world.

****

Ichika is over the moon to see Kazui, a happy mood that lasts all of three days before Kazui announces that he wants to make fireworks with the Shiba clan instead of joining the academy. The argument happens just inside the walls of Seiretei, with Ichigo practicing sparring with Renji a couple metres away, pretending he's not listening. Rukia had made excuses to not practice with them, sending Renji some strange eye messages that Ichigo was trying not to think about.

“But you're a Kurosaki,” Ichika says. “Why the hell wouldn't you be a shinigami? It took you two seconds to find your Mom in Rukongai, and your Dad hasn't managed that once.”

“He didn't look,” Kazui says dismissively. Ichigo falters, and the flat of Renji's sword stings across the back of his leg. Ichigo swears, and tries to remember what Rukia said: _it doesn't mean it wasn't real._

“I think Mom'd make a good shinigami,” Kazui continues. “But I just wouldn't. Apparently the Shibas are part of my family. I should get to know them.”

“What, and I'm not family, just 'cause we don't share blood?” Ichika shoots back. 

“You can visit! I can visit!” 

“It's really not that easy to get a pass to get from Rukongai to Seireitei or vice versa, okay? You only got here so easy 'cause my Mom is a captain and personally went to escort you!”

“Well, that's dumb, and should change!”

Renji catches Ichigo's eye. “Your kid is more like you than I thought.”

Ichigo punches him. Lightly. Renji's always so smug in his white captain coat.

“How is your mother?” Ichigo asks Kazui later, when it's just the two of them, and Kazui is preparing to leave. 

“She's doing great,” Kazui says, and he sounds genuine enough that Ichigo relaxes. 

“And Ishida?”

Kazui smiles. “Yeah, he's good too. They're both good.”

“Good.”

They stand in silence, comfortable. Ichigo regards his son carefully, something settled in him that he hadn't even known was off all these years in Soul Society.

“Give Ganju a kick for me,” he says. 

“You can give him one yourself, when you come to visit.” 

Kazui hesitates then, his smile faltering at the corner of his mouth. Ichigo takes a step closer, sensing something changing in the air.

“I didn't want to tell you until I was certain,” Kazui says softly. “I figured I'd be able to feel it better here. Remember it properly. I was really small when it happened anyway.”

“What is it?” Ichigo says, but there's an icy hand on the back of his neck that says he knows already. 

“It didn't feel like the end of it, when I met Yhwach,” Kazui says. “I know they said I erased all trace of him, that there wasn't anything left, but it didn't feel like it to me. It felt like maybe it was over only for that lifetime. It might be nothing, but maybe we need to watch out.”

His right hand is trembling slightly, pinching at his left sleeve. Ichigo doesn't understand sometimes how he helped to make a man as gentle as Kazui, but it doesn't matter that they're both spirits now; he still has an obligation to protect that gentleness.

“You need to make fireworks,” he says. “I'll watch out, and you'll be fine.”

“What about Rukia?”

He has never called her Aunt Rukia. Like his mother, he's always been able to see too much.

“We'll both watch out.”

Ichigo dreams that night: in it, he is running. The woman in white is beside him, and he wants to see her face so badly he can taste it. The want is bigger than the fear, and that is the scariest bit of all.


	3. third: wallowing

When Ichigo tells Rukia of Kazui's insight, she insists they let the Captain Commander know at once.

It turns out that he already knew. Or less that he already knew, but that no one in the upper ranks of Soul Society believed Yhwach was truly gone when Kazui erased his reiatsu as a child, and that a special division made up of members of the 12 th  and the 2  nd  has been secretly patrolling ever since to make sure nothing like Yhwach crops up.

Rukia demands to know why they were not informed, and Shunsui waffles, but Ichigo knows. This is a place that still wants to have a huge ceremonial execution stand—the times of secrecy and seedy dealings are not behind them just because some of their leaders are closer to them.

“Is it the Quincy you mean when you say 'nothing like Yhwach', or is it just Yhwach himself?” Ichigo asks.

Mayuri, standing behind Shunsui's left shoulder, grins.

“Of course it's just Yhwach,” he says. “I would love to have a discussion with your Quincy friend if you can locate him in Rukongai though.”

Ichigo's knuckles hurt again.

“I need to find Ishida,” he says, as soon as they leave the meeting. Renji steps in front of him and stops him with a hand on Ichigo's chest. It would have been infuriating back when Ichigo was a teenager, but he's better at hiding his anger now. Marginally.

“You do not need to find Ishida,” Rukia says, standing strong beside her husband. They fit together like two pieces of a sword, and Ichigo is standing too close to avoid injury. “Ishida is fine where he is, and you know Mayuri would never go after him. He still needs the support of his place in Soul Society to continue having access to all the technology he needs to run his experiments, and no one here would support him if Ishida were harmed.”

“Maybe finding Ishida would make me miserable enough that we wouldn't even have to worry about Yhwach,” Ichigo says.

Rukia and Renji stare at him, confused, a matched set since childhood. Ichigo's heart thunders in his ears, and he goes into shunpo so fast he almost leaves it behind.

The special kind of despair Yhwach instilled in him all those years ago is something he still remembers, different somehow than even the despair of his mother dying, or of Rukia being taken to Soul Society, or of Ichigo being crumpled in the rain without his fullbring powers, abandoned by all his friends. It's different because it never left him.

He ends up on the hill where he told Rukia about his mother, but Rukia is not the one who comes to find him there.

“Are you that upset that she's moved on?” Ichika asks.

She's standing in front of him with her arms crossed, every inch her parents, even now that she's stopped wearing her hair in an imitation of Renji's. Ichigo snorts and lies back to avoid her eyes. The “she's” in his head are getting tangled again.

“I'm a superior officer,” he says. “You don't have the right to talk to me like that.”

“Like what?” she says. “Like a friend? I may have been a kid when you and Orihime were together, but I wasn't blind.”

She sits down beside him.

“If you're upset about her and Ishida, why haven't you tried to find her since coming to Soul Society?”

“I'm not.”

Ichika waits, impatient, but clearly trying to channel her mother. Ichigo sighs.

“How did you know I was up here?” he asks.

“My mom told me you might be.”

Ichigo doesn't ask why Rukia herself didn't come, even though it's all he can think about.

“I miss her,” he says. “But not in the way I would've if we were separated when we were alive. I know the difference. If she and Ishida are happy, I'm happy for them.”

“So you're jealous for different reasons.”

Ichika has always been blunt, ever since she was a child. Ichigo remembers his son blinking soppily after her, even when she had said something immeasureably awkward. Remembers what Orihime had said to Kazui about it.

“I don't think it's really an appropriate thing to talk about with you.” he says.

“Appropriate?” she scoffs. “You've never been appropriate your whole life! Some of the things my mom's told me about you...your whole human lifespan, whenever we weren't visiting you guys, she was going on about the stuff you guys got up to when you were younger, usually as a cautionary tale. It was practically like you were a third parent or something, mom showing me what not to do with you as an example.”

“Then you definitely shouldn't be talking to me about this,” Ichigo says, shaken somewhere deep inside.

She falls quiet. After a moment of them sitting side by side, motionless, Ichigo steals a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Her knees are drawn up to her chest, arms folded on top and chin tucked in the middle of them, and she looks more pensieve than usual. He wonders what it would have been like to raise someone like her. Kazui had been so mild once his powers settled, but Ichika, like her father, seems to have never been mild in her entire life.

“You're barely older than me now, you know,” she says at length. “When I was born, you were what, twenty human years older? Something like that? Considering that we've both lived more than a full human lifespan now, that difference means practically nothing.”

Horror clutches at Ichigo's insides, and he fights to keep it from showing on his face. Is that how Rukia sees it too? Ichigo as still little more than a child, maybe even no different than her own child?

“It means something,” he says. “A human lifespan may be worthless to shinigami, but it meant something when I was living it.”

“I wasn't saying that,” she says quietly. “Of course you and Orihime meant something. I was only trying to express that you don't need to talk down to me.”

Ichigo doesn't know if he's relieved that Ichika misunderstood the source of his anger, or ashamed that Orihime wasn't his reason for it. He misses her abruptly, with a sharpness he hasn't felt since he arrived here, and he lies back on the hill, Rukia's hill, and lets himself sink into it.

“Do you want me to go?” Ichika asks.

Ichigo grunts, and closes his eyes.

“Do what you want.”

Ichika leaves, but not right away. Ichigo thinks of Orihime's smile and how fast and happy she could talk, how willingly she would draw him into her arms at the slightest sign of upset on his face. The sun on his skin is almost as warm as her touch, and the sting of those missing hands fades slowly into soft remembrance.

He can sense Rukia just at the edge of the clearing that leads to the hill, unmoving. Even when everything else is out of reach, he can always sense her.

****

He avoids Rukia after that.

It only makes sense: if his happiest moment in his last lifetime was the day of her captaincy and her visiting to bring all of his friends and their two families together, any day beside her in this new lifetime could be his happiest. It's too dangerous. The offical line is that anyone involved with the final battle with Yhwach—anyone who faced him and thus might be someone he'd appear to in keeping with his final promise—is to go about their lives as normal and let the Captain Commander and his special divisions keep an eye on things. Staying away from Rukia seems to be the most that he can do right now.

It feels cowardly anyway.

At first he has excuses, plausible distractions to draw him from her side. Karin and Yuzu moving to the Seireitei so Karin can go to the Shinigami academy. A surge of movement in low level menos grande breaking through across the lower half of Japan. Ikkaku dragging every man he knows into a month long bachelor party before his and Yumichika's wedding.

The absence of his human friends rings the worst towards the tail end of that adventure. Ikkaku waxing drunken poetic about Yumichika's “stupid hair”, and Ichigo staring into the distance with his hands gone numb around an icy drink. It was fine before Yhwach, when he thought he had all the time in the world to settle into being a Shinigami full-time, all the time in the world to wait for them to come to Seireitei. But now, it feels like time is trickling through his fingers, and their faces blur in his vision.

Ikkaku pounds Renji on the back and asks him about married life, and laughs when Renji shoves him off, hot-faced. They've got something Ichigo won't have—can't have. A dark shape peers over his shoulder and weighs his mood on a scale in its hands. The drink burns cold down his throat.

He was supposed to change things, him and Rukia. So many things to change, and he can't even stand abreast with her without threatening everything.

Someone at the party asks him why they've never seen him with a partner. Byakuya's new vice-captain, a slick, chilly man. Something Takahashi.

“Busy missing your late wife?” he says. “Would've thought you'd've fetched her from Rukongai by now. Troubled times like these, we all need a little happiness, don't we?”

It's the drink that stops Ichigo from punching him. He finds himself on the balcony, blinking stupidly up at the moon. Below him, Renji's swaying figure meets a rigidly tall one at the doors to the crazy house Ikkaku's borrowed. Ichigo watches the two of them speak, loose and friendly despite who the second person is. He wishes it were him and Rukia down there instead of her husband and her brother, and does not think about the oddness of Byakuya willingly showing up to a party like this. Envy has no shape or reason.

His excuses get sloppier after that. A vice-captain making sure they're never alone with their captain gets conspicuous pretty quickly, and Rukia has never been one to ignore Ichigo being foolish. Confused looks turn to hurt, which turns to cornering him one day in the barracks of the thirteenth.

“Ichigo,” she says. “Why don't you come train with me.”

“I'm busy,” he says. Technically, he actually is—he'd been discussing some paperwork with the fifth seat of their squad, a tiny girl who barely comes up to his elbow.

Rukia gives her a look that's scarily reminiscent of her brother, and the girl scampers off immediately, apologizing. Rukia's been more about the scary eyes recently, and Ichigo doesn't know if it's related to Yhwach, or something else. She returns her gaze to Ichigo.

“And now you're not,” she says.

“I thought you always trained with Renji.”

Rukia hesitates. “He's busy.”

“Then I guess you're out of luck for training partners.”

Her face shifts into something Ichigo remembers very vividly from being fifteen years old and ten seconds away from her fist ripping him out of his body. She places her hand on her sword.

“Well, if you're too busy to go to the training grounds, we can always train right here.”

The rest of the fight is still mostly through words alone—Rukia not being one for property damage—but when Ichigo refuses to explain why he's been so distant, she eventually freezes Ichigo's arm to the side of the building and storms off. It's a very effective way to ensure she gets the last word. Ichigo doesn't even try to break free—just lets his shoulder go loose until the ice feels more like a support than a prison, the only thing still keeping him upright. It doesn't feel cold, strangely, and doesn't hurt; the full extent of Rukia's powers is a mystery to him even now.

A passing student from the academy lingers too long in the corridor, clearly gawping.

“What are you looking at?” Ichigo snarls, and they scurry away. It isn't as satisfying as it should've been.

He sulks; stops trying to pretend that that's not what he's doing. After a while, a voice breaks through.

“You're being stupid, you know.”

It's Renji, perched on the banister a few metres away. They're on the second floor, and in the courtyard below, Byakuya waits, pointedly looking away.

“You'd know all about that, wouldn't you,” Ichigo says.

When they were younger, that would've been enough to derail Renji into righteous fury for at least a couple minutes, but now he just puts his chin in his hand and stares Ichigo down.

“Rukia said you were too busy to train with her,” Ichigo says.

Renji raises his eyebrows. “She hasn't told you?”

Ichigo heart does something sickly in his chest—half excitement, half dread. “Told me what?”

Renji shrugs, carefully casual. “We just don't train together anymore. I'd tell you to ask her what it's about, but apparently, you've got your head up your ass and aren't talking to her. Or paying attention to anything that isn't your own little problems.”

“How is it any of your business who I talk to?”

“She's my wife,” Renji says. “And you're my friend. Or supposed to be. I was there with you when Yhwach was taken down the first time, you think I don't get what this is about?”

The ice feels cold now, but Ichigo doesn't have the energy to break free and escape this conversation. The dread's taken over now.

“You don't need to avoid your friends to keep us safe,” Renji says. “You're just hurting her for no reason.”

“I can't talk about this with you, okay?” Ichigo says. “I would've thought you, more than anyone, would want to see her safe. All of us safe.”

“One thing I've never understood about you is how much you underestimate her,” Renji says. “From as far back as when we went to Hueco Mundo that first time. She's a warrior too.”

Ichigo remembers Renji stepping between him and Rukia back then, turning Ichigo's concern into an insult. Remembers Rukia's insistence on not needing to be protected, and how it had felt to feel her reiatsu fade. Remembers sitting with her on a hill and hearing about the fight that almost took her from them, her white coat spread on the grass by his hand.

“I don't underestimate her,” Ichigo says. “I never have.”

He would carry her, is all. He would carry all of them if he could. What is the point of his strength if he cannot shield his friends? But Renji would only fight it if he said that. Rukia too. The two of them have always been on the same wavelength in that in a way that Ichigo could never be. It doesn't matter that he understands what they feel—he can't help wanting to come between them and danger.

“She's my—”

Ichigo's voice fails him. A split second, a hitch in Renji's expression.

“Captain,” Ichigo finishes. “She's my captain, I know what she's capable of.”

“Good,” Renji says.

“Good,” Ichigo parrots back.

Renji sighs. “Have you really not gotten your arm free yet? She does that to me all the time, it's nothing if you actually want to be free of it.”

Ichigo stubbornly keeps his arm pressed against the inside of the ice, holding it around him. He clenches his jaw and doesn't say anything.

“The other day, when you told Rukia you couldn't come with me and her because you were “sparring” with Kenpachi?” Renji says, actually doing the air-quotes motion. “Forget the fact that we know you run like hell every time you see him—you want to know what we did that afternoon?”

“No,” says Ichigo, being completely honest.

“We went to visit Shihouin Yushiro.”

Ichigo blinks. “Who?”

Renji throws his arms up in the air. “Yoruichi's little brother! Been bedridden for approximately two hundred years, literally no one knows how he even survived the war, last person to see Yoruichi and Urahara alive?”

“Right,” Ichigo says, even though that clears up very little for him. He always feels strangely guilty when the disappearance and assumed death of those two come up, like he should've somehow stopped it, helped them. There are a lot of reasons he tries not to think about the war.

“See, Rukia's been keeping an ear out, and she overheard the Captain Commander saying something about Yushiro. That he's been getting better lately, slowly, and that he'd told them something interesting.”

Ichigo waits, trying not to show his interest.

“The kid wouldn't say it when I was in the room,” Renji says, looking disgruntled. “But Rukia told me afterwards.Yushiro heard Urahara's last words, right before they all passed out.” He leaned forwards. “It was, 'Kurosaki, Kuchiki, I leave it to you.'”

Ichigo blinks at him. “What?”

“He had to have meant the battle. Yhwach,” Renji says. “Urahara thought it would come down to you and Rukia against Yhwach.”

That man and his straw hat had been part of Ichigo and Rukia's story for as long as there has been a story for them to have. He has been character and creator almost as much as enemies like Aizen and Yhwach had been. Ichigo thinks of every moment Urahara seemed to help only for there to be another motive revealed, every strange thing he said that turned out to have a greater meaning later on. The guilt turns over in his stomach, burning up to a heat closer to anger.

“He thought a lot of weird stuff,” Ichigo says. “He always put so much on us, both of us, all of us, and yet where is he now?”

He can't be dead. If he is dead, it is a failure of Ichigo's. If he is alive, Ichigo can be mad at him for not being here now, when Ichigo needs him.

“Look, I'm not saying I think Urahara was right about everything,” Renji says. “I'm just saying, if he didn't count Rukia out of the solution, I don't think you should. Maybe instead of feeling sorry for yourself, you could think about that.”

Renji leaves Ichigo against the wall with the ice, and joins Byakuya on the ground floor. Neither of them look back when they leave, and Ichigo stays in the ice for a long time afterwards, letting Rukia's power keep him upright.

****

Ichigo finds Rukia in the dojo she and Renji share. He has to blast through a thick layer of ice around the door before he can get in; she's in the centre of the arena sized room, moving her sword in graceful, purposeful arcs over her head.

Her power feels different.

She does not acknowledge him, though the ice begins to melt in a soft circle around him. He takes the chance to just look at her, thinking about Rukia telling him that Renji was busy. He wonders for a split second, the way he never likes to do, at what secrets they have between the two of them, what waters they have to cross to come to an understanding about how it works—how they work. It took Ichigo decades with Orihime, but he'd always assumed it would have been easier for those two.

“Why don't you and Renji train together anymore?” he calls.

She lowers her sword, and opens her hand. “Close the door.”

Ichigo seals the door shut behind him, and she looks at him warily. He opens his mouth to apologize, but halfway through his intake of breath, she snaps her fingers.

The entire room seems to bend inwards suddenly, ice and matter and being and nothingness rushing in towards her open palm. It feels a little like having his soul ripped out of his chest, except he is all soul now, all curving in her direction. The world twists into her, and he twists with it, growing hotter and hotter until he thinks he is going to be consumed by it.

And then it levels out, and it simmers, settles. Sinks into his skin until he is blinking and gasping, still standing at the door with Rukia in the centre of the room, and the walls completely bare, not a sliver of ice to be found.

She's at his side in one step. “Ichigo?” Her hand is on his chest, pressing frantically. “Are you alright, are you—”

“Yes,” he says, and realizes that somehow, he's not lying. There's a glow in his chest. He feels like he could run a thousand miles and never tire. “What the hell was that?”

“The answer to your question,” she says. “Sode no Shirayuki is changing. She's been changing for a long time. Do you feel weaker? Drained at all?”

“No,” Ichigo says. “The opposite. Did you make it melt all at once, how did you—”

“I just made it...not exist,” she says. She turns on the spot, staring at the blank walls around them in something caught halfway between fear and awe. There's a glimmer of frost in her hair. “And this is only her in shikai. You're sure you don't feel ill?”

Ichigo laughs. It feels like he hasn't laughed in weeks. “Rukia, I could fight Yhwach right now.” More than that, he can joke about it, and he sees in her face that she understands how big that is.

“I thought you might feel like that,” she says. “Well, I hoped.”

“Did that move hurt Renji?”

Her face clouds. “It seemed to pull energy from him. Sode no Shirayuki isn't entirely certain how it works yet herself—we have some theories, but the last time I used it when he was around, it—it wasn't good. I hurt him and the dojo. It's only just been fixed up.”

“When was this?”

“Around a year ago.”

“A year?”

She's not looking at him now, drifting away further into the dojo. He follows, indignant. “And you didn't tell me?”

“Not every problem I have with my husband is your business, Ichigo,” she says sharply.

Ichigo stops in his tracks. Her back goes coat hanger stiff under her haori. It used to hang too heavy on her. Now it fits. More than Ichigo has ever fit in Karakura, in Soul Society, in this dojo, in her prescence at all.

For years, he's tried so hard to not notice what is between Rukia and Renji that he didn't see when something was hurting there.

She sighs, and turns.

“I'm sorry.”

The words are Ichigo's. “I'm sorry I've been avoiding you. That I haven't been being a good friend. I'm sorry if that was something that made you feel like you couldn't talk to me.”

She smiles slightly, and it's so welcome that Ichigo can almost feel a weight lift from his shoulders. “It used to be my job to tell you when you were being selfish.”

“You're busy being captain,” Ichigo says. “It's only fair that Renji shares some of his wife's burdens.”

The smile goes a little strange on her face, and Ichigo realizes distantly that it is the first time he's ever called her Renji's wife out loud. The dojo makes it sound odd, too big and too small all at the same time.

“He talked to you,” she says.

“He loves you,” Ichigo says. “'Course he did.”

A flower of ice blooms in her hand, reflecting blue shapes onto her face. She ripples her fingers, and it winks out of existence.

“He is a captain too,” she says. “I can't pull him from the battlefield simply because my power has become too toxic to train with. I can't be selfish. I sparred with my brother as well, and even when my blade was not aimed at him, that move had the same result as with Renji.”

“It didn't hurt me,” Ichigo says. “It felt—it feels—”

He can't describe it, both hoping and hurting at the idea that she will be able to see it in his face alone. He doesn't want to be so transparent to her, but he always has been.

“I gave you my power once,” she says. “I thought—hoped—that that might mean something.”

“Are you asking me to train with you for real now?” he says.

“I meant it the first time,” she says. “But you were too busy being—”

“Selfish, I know,” he says.

“I was going to say 'you',” she says. “Wanting to protect us isn't a bad thing. It's just unecessary.”

She pauses, staring down at her sword.

“Tell me one thing,” she says. “Were you avoiding everyone, or just me?”

The heat in Ichigo's limbs still hasn't faded. He wants to fight, and she looks so good. It makes it easier to lie.

“All of you,” he says. “Everyone I could.”

Her head is still dipped, and what little he can see of her face is masked, Kuchiki-controlled. He's grateful for it now, because he doesn't know if he could handle what relief would mean. Or worse: disappointment.

The moment passes, and she looks up.

“I don't know if Yushiro heard right, or what Urahara meant,” she says. “But Sode no Shirayuki has always liked you, and I need someone captain-class to test my blade on.”

“We said we'd change things together,” he says. “If Yhwach wants a fight, he can be one of those things.”

Her grin, when it blooms, is a sharp, arms flung wide, kamikaze sort of grin. She raises her sword, and points it towards him, bending her knees into a ready stance. She looks powerful, and he shivers.

“Then come,” she says.

****

If he were braver, he would ask.

Kazui introduces him to Greg, who lives near the Shiba clan and was a fire-eater when he was alive. Matsumoto and Shuhei go on a disastrous date that they both individually complain to him about at separate drunk occasions. Ichika asks to train with him after her boyfriend of a decade breaks up with her, and she ends up yelling more than just kidou spells.

Even Karin seeks him out one day to mumblingly explain that she never got married in her human life because she doesn't feel that way about people.

Ichigo is no longer the kid who blushed at the thought of a girl sitting on his bed; he can talk about the mess that is romance with other people. He can be an ear to their troubles, even if he has little advice to offer.

But even though he thinks about it, about asking, he can't be that for Rukia or Renji. His head is a hallway full of closed doors, and he knows which doorknobs to keep his hands away from.

Rukia stays up in her office more and more nights. Renji still kisses her goodbye, but not as often as he used to. Ichigo doesn't catch Renji lost in staring at Rukia anymore. The three of them go on missions together, and Ichigo doesn't feel like he's intruding when he comes upon them talking alone.

Renji and Rukia have had the equivalent of almost two human lifetimes together when Ichigo finally puts his finger on what seems different.

They act no longer like the people he knew when he was forty years old and married to Orihime. They act like they did just before Yhwach the first time.

Ichigo can't tell if it's Rukia's power's changing that's done it; if anything's even happening at all; if Ichigo's just inventing it in his head, seeing problems that aren't there in an effort to make up for his years of avoiding too much thought of the two of them together. A fade is not the same as a fight, and he doesn't trust his own perception, not about this. He'd seen that Ichika's boyfriend was going to break up with her a month before it happened, but this he can't see clearly.

If he were braver, he'd ask. But time passes, and he doesn't say a word.

Yhwach stands on the end of his tongue.

****

In his dreams, the woman in white crouches beneath a shadow. When he moves to challenge it, he sees that it's his own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> addressing urahara's confusing foreshadowing last words from the manga! (which honestly is still to me one of the clearest points that say kubo changed his plan for how the final battle was going to play out last minute. it was supposed to end the way it began: with the human and shinigami sides of the story taking down the final boss)
> 
> i think there's going to be two more chapters left! three if i end up being really verbose. trying to write fanfic while juggling two jobs is making updates drawn out, but fear not, it will all get done.


	4. fourth: expanding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> very busy early summer kept me away, but I'm back for anyone who still remembers this fic exists! the plot takes shape. just when i think i know everything i'm going to tackle in this story, this hell manga taps me on the shoulder and reminds me of more questions the ending gave me!

Training with Rukia breathes life into Zangetsu in a way he wasn't prepared for.

Sometimes Ichigo's hands hurt again in the mornings, when the darkness has just been peeled back from the sky and everything is too fresh and tender. He flexes his fingers and stares at Zangetsu propped against the wall. The sword stares back, and Ichigo can almost hear his voice in his ear, an insistent, wordless push towards something. Zangetsu uses his voice so sparingly lately that hearing it is almost strange.

For some reason, he can feel Ishida very brightly one morning, like a constant prick at the edge of his consciousness. He knows Ishida hasn't come up to the Seireitei, but the sensation is so close that it's almost like he has, like he's standing right outside the doorway, just waiting for Ichigo to throw a punch.

It feels almost like stubbornness at this point that neither of them have seen each other since death.

Something squirms underneath Ichigo's skin, and he shows up early to the dojo, Zangetsu singing away against his back.

The door is locked. When Ichigo leans against it to wait, his eyes fall on a low spreading cherry tree across the clearing, with a small pond underneath and pink fallen petals pooling on top and around it. A man with red hair is sitting on a bench beneath the tree, his back to Ichigo.

“Waiting for her?”

Renji doesn't look up when Ichigo approaches, his eyes on his hands clasped around Zabimaru's handle. The sword is in its sealed form, stuck in the ground in front of him, and the side of Renji's left hand is bleeding.

“No,” he says. “That's your cross to bear now.” Then, amused: “She can take a long time getting up when she's tired.”

There's cherry blossoms on Renji's shoulders, but Ichigo can smell effort underneath their perfume, sweat. It mixes, strangely alluring.

“Well, since she's not here yet, would you mind opening the door?” he asks.

“Kuchiki dojo,” Renji says. “Gets opened and locked by a Kuchiki. I'm not going to be dumb enough to try and fuck with that rule.”

“So you were fighting Byakuya just now?”

Renji looks up at that.

“Not just now,” he says. “He's been gone for about half an hour.”

“Weird that you still smell like a sewer then.”

Renji hits him once, hard in the leg. Ichigo sways on the spot and clutches at the muscle, grinning stupidly.

“Still can't beat him?” he asks.

“Shut up.”

A breeze catches the top of the tree, and a branch slaps across Ichigo's shoulders. A petal clings to the back of Renji's hand, stuck fast in the smear of blood.

“I thought back then that I wanted to beat him only so I could reach her again,” Renji says suddenly.

He's looking at his hand. The blood is ruining the petal's pink.

“Turns out that I didn't need to defeat him to do that, and yet I still can't shake it.”

“You're allowed to want to get stronger just for yourself,” Ichigo says. “That's not—you can have more than one reason for something. You think I didn't?”

“That's exactly what I think,” Renji says. “You know how jealous I was of your stupid single-mindedness when we met? All that 'I have to save her', 'swear to my soul' stuff. Say what you want, you didn't think of anything else.”

Ichigo stares down at him, feeling strangely powerless.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Fuck if I know.”

It sounds like a lie.

Renji shifts on the bench, like he's thinking of making space, then abruptly stands.

“I'll get him next time,” he says. “Don't tell Rukia who I've been sparring with now. She always worries I'm going to provke him into going overboard one day and killing me.”

“You're a captain,” Ichigo says. It's the only thing he can think of to say.

“Yeah, you'd think she'd trust me to survive a fight with her brother,” Renji says. “But it's nice, you know, that some things don't change.”

The petal is still stuck fast to his bloody hand when he leaves.

****

“Release it.”

Ice arcs towards his throat, and Ichigo ducks underneath. A white ribbon forms a circle in the air.

“Release it!”

Ichigo flash steps away, blinking into different corners of the room as spires of ice thrust up from the ground, half a heartbeat behind him. His lungs feel like they've been coated over with frost.

Renji was right: Rukia looks tired.

“I thought we were working on your powers,” he yells. “Not mine!”

The edge of Rukia's hair has gone white, but it's not her bankai. Ichigo may not have seen her bankai before, but he knows this isn't it. Everything's too familiar, too warm still.

“Renji said you had absolute zero,” he says. “Where's that?”

“You think I'd come at an opponent in bankai when I could beat them in shikai?” Rukia throws back. “Raise your power level and maybe I will do the same.”

Blades of ice shoot out from her palm, and Ichigo dances backwards, almost hitting one of the new pillars behind him. When the ice clears, she's suddenly there, in front of him, and the feel of her sword hitting his reverberates all the way up his body.

“Do you think I cannot handle it?” she says. The only spot on his body that isn't cold is his face where her breath touches. He braces his free hand on the flat of his blade and shoves forward, throwing her back. She skids to a halt a couple metres away, her fingers leaving streaks on the ice, and he tries to look an unconcerned as possible.

“No,” he says. “But it's as you said. I don't need to bring it out right now. Why does it matter?”

“It matters,” she says, “because I've mentioned sparring in bankai several times before now, and you have always deflected me.”

Ichigo shrugs, and sends a “Getsuga Tenshou!” hurtling her way with a flick of his wrist. The earth splits and Rukia flips out of range easily.

“We can't properly test Sode no Shirayuki if you will only give me half of yourself!” she yells.

Ichigo claws a mask over his face and shoots towards her, but ice rises up to meet him, and he is forced to spin in mid-air, plant his feet on the column, and spring backwards. He senses Rukia behind him and twists—his sword squeals on the edge of hers.

“Ichigo,” Rukia says, her face terrifyingly close behind the cross of their blades. Ichigo has the sudden thought that this was maybe how she looked in prison, soft through white bars.

They throw each other off and land back on the ground. Rukia's ice dissolves, and Ichigo waves the mask away.

“You haven't used it since the battle with Yhwach, have you,” Rukia says quietly.

Ichigo shakes his head.

“He broke it,” he says after a moment. “Like it was nothing.”

“Nevertheless, you still have the power.”

He doesn't answer.

“Ichigo, I can feel in your reiatsu that you could access your bankai if you wanted to. You have not been barred from it.”

A pulse of energy moves up Ichigo's sword arm, and he can almost hear his hollow—Zangetsu—threatening to throw him off his throne and rise up. He grips the hilt harder and fights down a smile.

“I haven't needed it,” he says. “Besides, I didn't think too many people around here would take too kindly to a half-Quincy bankai.”

Rukia's shoulders drop. “You don't have to choose between those two sides of yourself.”

“Pretty certain we had a war that said I did.”

It's not something he thinks about a lot. Or ever, really. He can't feel his Quincy powers inside himself the way he can feel his shinigami powers. He never wanted to be anything other than a shinigami, so dwelling on the Quincy that sleeps in his chest seems counterproductive. He has what he wants, or at least an approximation of it.

He checked once, in the library at the academy, to see if Ishida—if the Quincy—were allowed to be in Soul Society at all, but if any laws had been made on where they were meant to go after death, Ichigo couldn't find them.

He can still hear Mayuri asking to speak to Ishida, his voice like oil.

“Fool.”

It's only years of knowing Rukia that make it so he can dodge the kick she aims at his head.

“Hey!” he shouts. “What was that for?”

“We are sparring, are we not?” she says. “Unless you thought we were stopping simply because you're scared?”

Ichigo ducks another kick. Ice flows up like water from the ground and wraps around his legs, holding him in place.

“I'm not scared!”

“Good,” she says. “That makes one of us.”

Ichigo catches her punch in the palm of his hand and brings her to a halt. She's breathing deeply, her fist clenched small and hard in his own, like the core of a planet. Ichigo's hand goes soil soft around hers, and his grip crumbles away until they are just standing face to face. With the ice around his thighs, he can't turn away.

“Being afraid of your own power is not the problem,” she says. “The problem is not confronting that fear.”

Ichigo almost asks then. Renji fresh on his mind from that morning, his back hunched under the cherry blossoms. But Rukia steps back.

“Perhaps,” she says, and then, in the distance, there is the sound of an explosion.

****

When Ichigo was a teenager, war had found him with speed and kept him close over months and years. When Ichigo was a teenager, things like bankai were straightforward. Things that he could be single-minded about.

These days, since Yhwach, war waits. It stalks, sits in the corner of his mind. It waits for him to blink first.

****

When the stalemate breaks, it's not Yhwach.

The screams don't come suddenly; they stack on each other like cards falling into place, at first wafer thin, and then building to something substantial, undeniable. Rukia is at the door before Ichigo has even placed a hand on the ice keeping him locked to the ground. She glances back at him, and Ichigo knows in that look that she's used up too much power in their session today to get it off of him fast enough.

“Go!” he shouts. “I'll catch up!”

She nods, and is gone.

Ichigo drives Zangetsu into the top of the ice by his hip, fracturing the structure all the way down to his feet. Through the clear lens of the ice, his whole right leg is briefly shattered into geometric shapes, blown into little pieces. He rips each piece away until he can step out, wrenching his other leg through.

It's been less than a minute since Rukia left when he makes it to the courtyard.

A plume of smoke rises on the horizon, where the third squad barracks are. The screaming stops.

Ichigo launches himself into the air. His feet barely touch the rooftops, one, three, seven, until suddenly there is no rooftop where there has always been one before.

He falls into the cracked open hole of what used to be a building. Something has blown the walls away, leaving ragged edges of concrete and paper, the space beyond it nothing more than a shifting spread of dust. A pale hand pokes out from under a section of crumbled wall, the knuckles flexing against the ground.

Ichigo loses time and vision somewhere between getting to the body and lifting the rubble off, but somehow he finds no relief in the finding a man beneath it.

“What happened?” he asks.

The man's torso strains up from the ground, his body unnaturally still from the waist down.

“She's in danger,” he pants. There's something wrong with his eyes, a sunken, blue colour tinging the corners, the whites.

“Who?” Ichigo demands.

The man seems to notice him then, mastering himself briefly.

“It made us see things,” he chokes, and then the blue grips at his eyes again. “She can't be—but I've got to save her, Mimi, I've got to, I've got to—”

He's inching himself forward with every word, legs dragging uselessly on the ground behind him. Ichigo steps back, spinning around wildly. He can see more arms now rising up from the wreckage of the barracks around him, soldiers struggling to move. A memory flashes wildly in his head: watching zombie movies with Orihime on the couch, Kazui hiding his face in her side every time a body started moving.

Ichigo pushes into the swirling dust, Zangetsu at the ready. The ground slopes, building into the third squad training ground. Tree branches reach out from the opaque air, sudden and alarming.

It starts to clear the higher he climbs, and he can glimpse movement at the top. He can hear her, Rukia and another familiar voice and something else, something not human. There's a flash of white—a cloak, a dress—and then a different glimpse of the same colour, shinier, like the skin of a beetle, like armour.

Ichigo bursts out of the dust.

She's on the roof of the training dojo, sunk to one knee in front of the twisting mass of a huge, bulbuous creature. White limbs bubble up out of the space where a hole would be on a hollow, pushing out against the skin of the thing's chest. There's no face, only a blue, yawning cavity, like a chunk of flesh has been cleanly scooped away—it looms over her, and she's not moving, just staring up.

Thoughts of being half-Quincy, or not needing it go out of his head; when his hand goes to his sword, he can feel the power of his bankai right underneath his palm, ready to be pulled out no matter what state it's in.

“Rukia!” Ichigo yells.

She turns.

He's too far away for her face to be anything other than a pale collection of features, but the whole of it distorts suddenly with some unknown emotion, and she thrusts her arm out towards him.

The wave of ice hits Ichigo in the chest. He braced at the last second, but it doesn't hurt—flying backwards feels more like being carried than being thrown. It's a pressure against his chest, right over the screaming beat of his heart, wind stealing tears up in the corners of his eyes as he hurtles farther and farther away from Rukia and the creature—the creature that is suddenly rearing up in one sinuous movement over her bowed head.

Ichigo tries to brake in midair, but the ice is insistent. Two spots of heat form spidery fingers on his shoulders; her hands guiding him backwards.

He starts to yell her name one more time, but that's when his back hits the building.

That—that hurts.

He doesn't remember anything after that.

****

Karin's above him when he opens his eyes.

“-ake up! Come on, wake up, it was just a little throw into a building, thought you were supposed to be captain-class.”

Chunks of hair are falling out of her ponytail in loops around her face. She's sweating, the usual humour gone from her voice—the other voice he heard with Rukia in the battle. Ichigo blinks once at her, registering first her face and the relief that comes with it, and then registering all at once the lack of another person beside her.

“Where's Rukia?” he asks, struggling to his feet. Blocks of mortar fall away from his lap—the wall behind him has gone soft as swiss cheese from his impact.

“I don't know,” Karin says softly. “We—I—the thing is dead, Captain Kurotsuchi got it, but the third squad captain—”

Someone is wailing.

Ichigo steps forward out of the rubble. There's a hazy tableau of people in a corner of the ruined courtyard, a woman crouched over what looks like a crumpled heap of clothing, Mayuri's distinct, horned outline hovering at her shoulder.

When he gets closer, he can see that it's not clothing lying small and crumpled on the ground—it's the misshapen leftovers of a person. Sticky black threads stretch into a cavity where the other half of the body should be, as if the man had always been two pieces just sealed together by tar, and had only now been ripped apart again. There is no blood, just spots of black like beauty marks on Kira's chalky face.

It's the same injuries he sustained in the war—the synthetic flesh Mayuri had gifted him then is missing.

His white haori pulls away from his chest, crunching in Hinamori's fists. She's beyond words, and Ichigo feels a slow, cold stillness steal over him at the sight. He'd been training with Rukia only moments before, debating the finer points of power, and now—he looks away, looks around.

He can't see Rukia anywhere.

“I last saw her in the battle,” Karin says, following him forward into the dust. “She blocked a shot meant for me, but the thing it—it was affecting her and everyone else, doing something weird to their heads. It didn't affect me; I told her to get back. She didn't listen.”

“Rukia!” Ichigo calls. He's spinning again, trying to throw his eyes into every corner, behind every tower of rubble. There's too many bodies lying still, and his brain is seeing zombies everywhere.

“Rukia!”

Karin's calling as well, but the dust refuses to clear. He can feel it like sandpaper on the inside of his throat. Hinamori won't stop crying.

Ichigo stops moving, squeezing his eyes shut. When he's calm, he can sense Tatsuki on the far side of Rukongai, but now all he can sense is the fear focusing into a painful buzz in the front of his forehead. He's suddenly letting the visualizations of it flood in, all the stuff he normally blocks out: hundreds of ribbons of white reishi tangled around him like a cloud of broken electrical wires, useless and anonymous.

And then—a flash of red.

Ichigo lunges forward instinctively and grabs it. A shock of awareness fans out from his fingers through his whole body—Rukia's familiar power and spirit making a second home in his chest.

A voice calls out a kido, and Ichigo opens his eyes into a gust of wind.

The dust is sucked away, and Rukia is standing at the other end of the clearing, only a few steps away, one hand outstretched in a strange mirror of Ichigo. He's just opening his mouth to call for her when she lifts her chin, and their eyes meet.

The world becomes very small very suddenly.

Gravity has tilted on its side, and he's falling into her eyes because she's looking at him as open and devastated as he's ever seen. She's looking at him and years are dissolving in his head, bringing him back to a tiny bedroom and a girl stepping through the wall; bringing him back to phoenix fire and her suspended in the air; bringing him back to an hollow chest and Rukia dissolving in front of him. She looks stricken, and it's familiar in the way a teenage cousin last seen years ago as an infant is familiar—he knows this expression on her, but it's grown so much he can barely comprehend it.

She is looking at him in a way he doesn't have words for, and all he knows is that he wants to answer that look in the same language.

There's a scuffle behind him; the sound of a flash step. Rukia's gaze jerks away from his own, and it feels like an elastic band snapping back, rocking him back on his heels.

Renji is standing a few paces behind Ichigo, windblown and concerned.

“What the fuck happened here?” he says.

A blur of heat streaks past Ichigo, and Rukia throws herself into his arms.

Over the top of her head, Renji looks to Ichigo for some sort of explanation, but Ichigo doesn't have a responce in him. There's an adrenaline that's different from battle still putting his body on edge. Rukia's clinging to Renji, her arms tight around his waist.

The clearing is silent, eerily so.

She pulls back after a moment and drags his head down so she can press her mouth to his, fast and hard. Ichigo watches Renji's hands dumbly as they twist and catch on the back of Rukia's white coat before he's pulling her in. She's up on her tip toes. Her ankles are shaking.

Ichigo's chest is cold, the pressure from Rukia's ice lingering. He can't breathe through it, and he looks away. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Karin watching him.

The quiet is split by voices as more captains and vice captains flash into the ruined clearing, members of fourth squad springing out of the air, stretchers in hand. Ichigo swallows down the memory of Rukia throwing him across the field, and steps forward to meet them.

After a long moment, he figures out the strange silence underneath the chaos.

Hinamori has stopped crying.

****

It takes five shinigami to pull Renji off of Mayuri when he sees what happpened to Kira. Ichigo is not one of them. Mayuri is smirking coldly, the corners of it cracked with blue stripes, and a deep, slow anger takes root in Ichigo's stomach. There's thirteen dead soldiers, not including Kira.

“I may be able to save him again,” Mayuri says, offhandedly, when all the captains are standing together. “It's a shame that that...beast...got free of my containment field.”

The creature was simply a strange hollow he'd been studying from Hueco Mundo, he tells them. The escape was a regretful accident.

Ichigo's standing beside Renji when Mayuri says that. A soft, pained sound hums in the back of his throat, and Ichigo can feel it as if his hands are pressed to Renji's neck.

The Captain Commander takes Mayuri away to divulge more information, and squads four and five are tasked with the clean-up effort.

Ichigo can't quite stop looking at Rukia, catching the edges of her sleeves and hair in the glances he permits himself, and it's almost a relief when she's taken away from the battlefield with other survivors to be looked over by fourth squad and make sure that the creature's effects aren't lingering. She leaves behind white bands of pressure on Renji's hand when she has to let go.

“Ichigo and I were finished in the dojo,” she says to him, pressing a key into his hand. “Could you lock it?”

“Kuchiki dojo,” Renji says quietly.

“You are a Kuchiki,” Rukia says, unexpectedly fierce. “No matter what, no matter about names or anything else that happens, you will always be a Kuchiki.”

They look at each other for a long moment before he stoops to kiss her on the forehead. She closes her eyes into it, takes a deep breath and then takes her leave.

She doesn't look at Ichigo.

He watches her go, his own hands empty at his side. Half of him is still living in the moment she looked at him across the space between them, and that half is demanding something, an unspecified question beating its fists against Ichigo's skull.

The other half of him wants to fight something.

“I don't believe him,” Renji says.

He's staring off beyond Karin's shoulder at where Mayuri was lead away, his forehead tight.

Ichigo shakes his head. “That wasn't a hollow.”

“Got free of his containment field? What bullshit.”

“It only took from Kira the stuff that Mayuri had put there before,” Ichigo says. “As if it recognized it.”

“No one else had wounds like that,” Karin adds. “They all just—went crazy.”

“If we broke into the lab, we could prove he's lying,” Ichigo says.

“I've seen the defenses around that place, it's like a fucking fortress,” Renji says. He's grinding his jaw, teeth clicking audibly. “Fuck, we all knew Kira shouldn't've been a captain in the first place, he never recovered from all that shit years ago—”

Karin flicks a glance at Ichigo, and Ichigo steps into Renji's space, putting a hand on his shoulder to shake him slightly.

“What, Kurosaki, you got any more good ideas?” Renji growls.

Sometimes Ichigo thinks they never stopped the fight that began the moment Renji and Byakuya came to take Rukia away on a darkened Karakura street. Sometimes Ichigo thinks he's never had anyone closer to a brother.

“No,” Ichigo says. “But Rukia told you to lock the dojo, right?”

Renji uncurls his fist, and stares at the key like it's a lifeline, visibly relaxing. She's not even here, and Rukia knows exactly how to gentle him, distract him. Ichigo doesn't know which of them he's envious of.

“We'll figure this out,” he says.

“After we do what Rukia asked,” Karin says.

****

They go to the dojo together, the three of them. Ichigo had left the door open in his rush, and he lets Renji yell at him for it, lets him throw random pieces of the garden around until he suddenly tires, and slumps down against the side of the building. Renji puts his face in his hands, his hair gone wild around his shoulders, the ponytail completely unraveled. Ichigo sits down next to him.

It's Karin who takes the key and locks the dojo.

After a while, Ichika shows up to bring her father over to fourth squad, where Rukia has just been discharged with a clean bill of health. At the gateway to the courtyard, she hesitates, looking back at Ichigo still sitting on the ground.

“You're not coming with?” she asks. Sometimes her eyes look disturbingly like her mother's.

Ichigo shakes his head and doesn't say anything. He can feel Renji's eyes on him, but by now, they both know when to give the other silence or space, and Renji places his hand on Ichika's shoulder and guides her away.

Karin flops down next to Ichigo on the ground, sighing loudly. Sisters, on the other hand, have never cared about boundaries.

When he glances at her, she's looking at him already, her features drawn in towards a pinch in her brow, like fabric distorting around a pulled thread.

“What?” he says.

“I was here when the creature arrived,” she says. “I was too far away to see Kira's fight with it, but I saw everyone who came near it crumbling and clutching at their heads and—it didn't do anything to me at all.”

“Did it not see you?”

“It wasn't that,” Karin says. “It was attacking both me and Rukia when she got there, and she felt it, and I didn't. Mayuri showed up just after you tried to help.”

Ichigo remembers again: Rukia throwing him away from the battle, her arm flung out like she was reaching for a lifeline.

“The hollow—the thing—it talked to us while we were fighting. It was angry I wasn't reacting. It said—it said it made people see 'the partners of their soul in distress',” Karin says. “I guess his power only affected romantic love. Which makes sense with what Rukia said when I asked her what the fuck she was doing attacking you.”

Karin finally looks away, squinting out past the gate. She shrugs.

“She just kept saying she didn't want the way you finally got to see Orihime again to be like that.”

Ichigo stares at her. Something very complicated and and ugly kicks its way out of the hard shell of his insides and starts up a scream, childish and wanting. It thrums up his throat and by the time it reaches his mouth, it almost sounds like a laugh.

“Fuck,” he says. He tips his head to the sky, avoiding Karin's gaze. “Fuck.”

****

He ends up where he started hundreds of years ago: standing in a secret training ground that once belonged to a woman who was sometimes a cat. There are still marks on the boulders that he remembers putting there himself when he was a child, scraping power out of his chest because he had no other choice.

Ichigo draws Zangetsu and plunges him into the ground in front of him. He kneels.

"Okay," he says. Rubs his hands. Spits onto the ground beside him and plants his hands on his knees. "We can't sit around anymore. Stupid straw-hat told me once not to have fear in my sword. I can do this again."

Kazui's behind his eyes when he closes them. Kazui and Yuzu and Karin and Renji and Ichika and Chad and Ishida and Tatsuki and Orihime, Orihime who is still in Rukongai, Orihime who he is beginning to realize left a bigger hole than he'd thought.

Rukia, who he always thought saw him so transparently. It's a strange idea, that he can be opaque to her.

He has nothing to be afraid of, because he has people still to protect.

"Come on," Ichigo says. "If they're going to need a new captain now, we're going to be there."

Zangetsu wakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> have questions? next chapter will have the answers and will not take me three months. i promise, i know where i'm heading.
> 
> note: when this is all done, I'm going to do a quick overall edit and repost the whole thing, because writing a WIP is hell on my style, which usually involves going back and rewriting and adding things thousands of words ago once I've realized something else while writing! i'll keep us on track until the end, but when the last chapter comes, maybe reread the whole thing from the beginning.


	5. fifth: deciding

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> what is pacing, wip me has no idea. also, yes, i'm a slow writer, who wants to know

There's still blood sluggishly pushing up out of the gash on his arm when he reports to the meeting. Shunsui talks and Ichigo coagulates, turning hard and tough and pulling against his skin. The other vice captains are pretending they're not looking at him. At his elbow, Rukia is doing a much better job of it.

Kira is still alive for the moment, but if he recovers, he will not be able to continue on with his duties as Squad 3 captain, Shunsui tells them.

Takahashi stands at Byakuya's side, looking like he's salivating at the mouth. He was the candidate Rukia spoke so lowly of years ago, the one who was denied this captain seat when Rose was promoted up to the Zero Squad. The seat had stayed empty for decades until Kira quietly confirmed bankai with the captain commander and took the position shortly before Ichigo came to Soul Society.

Koya. That was his first name. Koya Takahashi. Half of the room looks to him or Ikkaku; half looks to Ichigo.

Ichigo looks back at them, remembering with a strange detachment the way he had once been willing to rip through every person in the room to save one woman. He wonders how the boy who was so sure of himself on that quest would look at him now.

Mayuri is missing, presumably because he's supposedly tending to Kira.

No decisions or deadlines are given in the briefing. Takahashi steps forward just before they are dismissed, but it's only to invite everyone to a celebration at his family's manor, ostensibly in Kira's honour. He has a smooth smile, and never seems ruffled—he suits being Byakuya's vice-captain more than Renji ever did.

Ikkaku catches up with Ichigo outside of the room, while everyone is slowly scattering.

“It's yours,” he says. “I'm not leaving the eleventh. I mean it, Kurosaki, it's yours. You think that Takahashi prick has what it takes over you? No one in that room does.”

Ichigo nods over Ikkaku's shoulder, where Yumichika is perched on a rooftop, watching them with open curiosity.

“Your husband wants to know what's happened, I think,” he says. 

Ikkaku punches him in the shoulder once, right over the newly dried crust of blood. His knuckles come away streaked with red.

“Don't fuck this up, Kurosaki.”

He doesn't even let Ichigo respond before he's springing over to the rooftop Yumichika is on.

“I'm not gonna, you asshole!” Ichigo yells after him. 

Ikkaku gives him the finger and leans down over Yumichika for a kiss. Ichigo looks away—he's got too many stones on his back today to add another one in jealousy.

He's jealous anyway, even without thinking about what Ikkaku has with Yumichika. All Ikkaku's ever cared about has been fighting. Not who it's for, not the reason behind it. It's the kind of streamlined attitude Ichigo can respect, even if he can't adopt it.

His eyes fall on Takahashi, who has somehow slipped up beside him without him noticing. He's taller than Ichigo, probably the same height as Renji, and Ichigo tries not to pull himself up too obviously in response.

“Adorable, isn't it?” Takahashi says, tipping his head towards where Ikkaku and Yumichika are now squabbling lightly over something. 

“I wouldn't let Ikkaku hear you call him adorable,” Ichigo says. 

“I just think he's got the right idea,” Takahashi says. “Love is the greatest source of happiness.”

Rukia had once told Ichigo not to get on Takahashi's bad side: that Takahashi's ambition might be calm enough to handle a rejection for a captain seat once, but not enough to handle an open rivalry. And it had been easy when both of them appeared equally disinterested with interacting.

For a while now—since Ikkaku and Yumichika's wedding, or maybe a little before—Takahashi has been watching Ichigo closer than he likes.

“You know, I've never seen you with a wife either,” Ichigo says. “So I don't know why you keep pestering me about mine.”

“Who said anything about a wife?” Takahashi says. “Orihime, wasn't it? No disrespect intended. I've heard she's a beauty. Perhaps I just wanted to know if she was officially on the market.”

“She's not something to be bought,” Ichigo snaps. 

Takahashi is silent for a brief moment, and Ichigo takes a deep breath, feeling a bit like he'd fallen through a trap door.

“It's touching to see you still care so much after all this time,” Takahashi says. “Imagine how nice it would be to see her again.” He smiles, and inclines his head a fraction. “I look forward to your presence at the party.”

He walks away, sedate and calm, and Ichigo slowly unwinds his fist from the folds of his shihakusho. He stands alone, trying to breathe. Rukia is waiting for him at the end of the hallway, one hand on the railing.

“I'm not going to it,” he says when he reaches her. 

“You are,” she says. “We all are.”

“I'd actually rather do division paperwork.”

“Ichigo.” The tone of her voice brings him to a stop as clearly as a hand on his arm. “He has access to information we've been trying to get for decades.”

Ichigo stares.

“I told you once that his family was powerful, but I didn't tell you that members of his family made up over half of Council 46 before Aizen slaughtered them,” Rukia says. “Nii-sama said there is a library in his mansion that he's certain will provide answers. The end of the war, what really happened to the Quincy—and the Soul King.”

Shortly after Rukia had become a captain, they'd spoken about it once, all of them—Ichigo, Orihime, Renji, Ishida, Chad, all cramped into the clinic Ichigo still thought of as his father's, with Kazui asleep in bed one floor above them. Rukia had been ashen-faced and quiet when she told them that they'd been wrong—her becoming a captain changed nothing about how much she was trusted by the higher-ups. They'd have to wait longer to discover what went on behind the scenes after Yhwach's death.

She had told him once that they needed more voices among the captains to make a difference. Now they both know it's not that simple. He's watched her argue during meetings and with her brother about how there's still change needed and seen her overruled even with his and Renji's support.

Longer had turned out to be measured in lifetimes instead of years.

“He showed Byakuya?” Ichigo asks. 

“Not all of it. Just enough for my brother to become suspicious about the restricted rooms within. Takahashi is not as smart as some of his predecessors—he enjoys showing off.”

“You think we could slip away during the party and investigate,” Ichigo says. 

Rukia nods. They're standing closer now, pulled together by the urgency of secrets, and he can feel her warmth radiating into him. He pictures the execution block of the Soukyoku rising above their bent heads like a guillotine—like a question.

“You noticed they didn't mention any sort of punishment for Mayuri, right?” Ichigo says. 

Rukia nods. “Renji's pressing the Captain Commander about it now. I doubt answers will be forthcoming.”

“Did it feel like this for you?” Ichigo asks. “Before you became—”

He waves loosely at her white coat, not sure what he's trying to convey.

“Nervous?” she says. 

“Like I'm about to go undercover,” he says. 

Rukia takes a slow, deep breath.

“During the ceremony I was so nauseous that I could barely breathe,” she says. “I focused on Nii-sama's face in the crowd to stay standing. He was smiling at me.”

Her sleeve brushes his. The white is so sharply different against the black of his own.

“For all its faults, this place is my home,” she says quietly. “Is it wrong that I still want it to be yours?”

“No,” says Ichigo helplessly.

It tastes like the truth. The word touches her skin and leaves it softer, like the relief of a sudden sunbeam shining down on her face from between clouds. His hands ache at his sides, but not for a sword.

“You'll get it, you know,” Rukia says abruptly. “If I know one thing, I know that.” 

“My bankai isn't fully controlled yet—”

“Then you will control it,” she says. “You're stronger than when you attained bankai the first time. You were little more than a child then.”

“And I'm not now?” he asks. 

Her eyes don't look the way they did on the battlefield, with scored ground and dust between them, but Ichigo is getting dragged into them anyway. He fights the lightheadedness, the urge to sway.

His mouth, he can't stop.

“You don't look at me and just see a stupid kid?” he says.

She takes a step away, and cool air reinserts itself down Ichigo's front.

“No,” she says. “I see you. I see you just as the man you are.”

She has gone somewhere deep within herself, where Ichigo is not able to tread. When he tries to close the distance, she backs up again, giving away nothing but a cool, Kuchiki smile

“I must get back to the barracks,” she says. She angles her head, and leaps off over the rooftops. 

A warmth threatens at the back of Ichigo's neck. If she does not see him as a stupid kid, he doesn't know how—he certainly feels it in this moment, asking questions he has no right to, and letting it get to his head.

Yhwach steps upon the thought and disperses it with his feet the way he would a reflection on the top of a puddle. Ichigo shakes himself and takes his own leave as well.

****

He goes to Yoruichi's training ground, but nothing will come.

He tries to return to the barracks, but Rukia will be there, and he can't.

He tries to visit his son, and has to stop at the end of the clearing, staring up at the building in the distance.

The puddle in his mind has gone smooth again, and there's a glow that won't get out of his chest, no matter how unwelcome it is, no matter how afraid it makes him. She sees him as a man. It's of no consequence, not when there's a man in black—and still another man in red—

They all spin in his mind like one of the fair games Yuzu would've dragged him over to in town when they were children. She liked the ones that relied on getting the proper timing to stop the spinner and win. They made her feel smart.

Ichigo's life isn't a game where timing will ever be on his side. It just keeps spinning.

But Rukia does not see him as a child. He can stand beside her in that, at least.

At this distance, Kazui will be able to feel him out here. His senses have always been stronger than Ichigo's. Ichigo stands in the cool grass and watches the door of the Shiba's house, wondering if Kazui is behind it, waiting to feel Ichigo step closer before he throws it open and rushes out.

The last time they spoke, they had fought. Ichigo had let slip that a woman in his division had asked him out and that he'd turned her down. Kazui hadn't found it to be the amusing anecdote Ichigo had intended. 

“I wish I had never told you he'd be back,” he'd yelled. He cries when he's angry, same as his mother. “You won't let yourself have anything good as long as he's hanging above you, and it's not fair, do you get that it's not fair?”

Someone—Ichigo doesn't remember who—had brought up the idea of bringing Kazui in to work on the Special Operations teams keeping an eye out for Yhwach. Ichigo had almost thrown them across the room.

He closes his eyes and brings his mind in so all he can feel is the grass on his ankles.

He can't be here right now, but maybe he can finally let himself have something else.

****

Rukongai looks the same as it did the day he fell from the sky and landed on Orihime's shield. The people are many and the smells are bright, and for all its dirt-stained differences from Karakura, it pulls his mind back there nevertheless. Yuzu threads through the reedy streets easily; unlike Ichigo, she and Karin lived here for years before Karin decided to enter the shinigami academy. He thinks it might have been a way to make up for lost time—Yuzu and her husband had moved to England in their human life for his business and ended up starting a family there, and Karin's soccer team hadn't travelled over to that part of the world often enough for either of them.

Ichigo keeps his eyes focused on Yuzu's back.

As they walk, the walls around them change, falter in strength. The eyes that follow them become less friendly, snagging on the edges of their shihakushos. A distant discomfort builds in Ichigo's stomach; the faces here are more familiar than most of the high-born faces in Seireitei, and yet he does not belong here.

When they cross over into Rukia and Renji's old district, Ichigo stops.

“This is the 78th?” he says. 

Yuzu smiles. “Different than you expected, right?”

The houses have been patched up, and the streets are clean. No one is shouting, apart from a group of playing children, who are all wearing actual clothing instead of rags. Someone is cooking something down the street, and a warm, spicy heat is filling the air.

It's nothing like Renji had described, years ago when Ichigo had finally asked.

“Is this because—?”

“It's this way!” Yuzu says. 

They follow the smell to a small town square, where a tall, hulking man in a yukata is bent over a stew pot. There's toddlers milling at his feet, a circle of old women working on a jumble of sewing, and two men standing off to the side, talking easily. The shorter of the two looks up and sees Ichigo at the same moment that Ichigo realizes just who he's looking at.

“Ichigo!” Akihiro says, Chad's husband, who had died ten years after him—and who should have definitely ended up in a completely different district. “It's good to see you!”

The man at the stew pot turns around, curly hair falling in his eyes, and Ichigo finds a particular smile in himself that he hasn't had a chance to use in years.

“Hey Akihiro,” he says. “Hey Chad.”

****

They sit on a hill that overlooks the district, lines of graves tagging the ground behind them. Chad is as calm and quiet as ever, pulling Ichigo's heartbeat slower. Below them, Yuzu allows herself to be chased by kids holding sticks, laughing.

“This is all you?” he asks, waving a hand at the peace displayed in front of them. Chad smiles slightly. 

“It was Akihiro's idea,” he says. “I had to find him. I knew when he died, and I knew he was it for me, so I found him.” He shrugs, as if that in itself isn't remarkable when finding someone in Rukongai is supposed to be nearly impossible if you don't know the shinigami who brought them in. “He'd met Yuichi, who still hadn't found his mother.”

“Yuichi?”

“The parakeet.”

The other man in the square suddenly shrinks down in Ichigo's mind, and he can see it—the little boy who had found a brother out of strangers and had asked Chad for a piggyback in Rukongai when they were teenagers. 

“Akihiro thought we could try and help people find their families.”

“Starting here?”

Chad nods.

“How's it gone?” 

“Slow,” says Chad.

“It would be easier if people were just kept track of when they died and came over,” Ichigo says. “If there were some sort of office people could go to to look up their dead relatives and find out where they ended up.”

Chad inclines his head. “Yes. That would help.”

Ichigo is silent for a moment.

“I haven't kept up my end of the bargain.”

“No,” says Chad. “There was no such thing.”

“We haven't made the same strides inside the wall that you have here.”

“Many more rules in there.”

“I fight for you, you fight for me,” Ichigo says. “I fight for what you fight for, you do the same. That was the bargain. I knew you weren't going to sit around when you got over here.”

Chad says nothing. His hands hang loose and easy past the forearms propped on his knees. He's waiting. 

It spills out of Ichigo, all of it: moving up the ranks with change in sight, the news about Yhwach, the time he's spent training with Rukia. 

“Kira got hurt,” Ichigo says. “He's not dead yet, but it was Mayuri's fault and—and there's an open captain seat.”

Chad nods.

“My dad used to be a captain and he left all this,” Ichigo says. “What if he had the right idea?”

“Did you come here so I could tell you you're not doing the wrong thing?” Chad asks slowly.

Akihiro has joined Yuzu with the children below, and is pretending to be a hollow, chasing them with his arms upraised. The children have started to yell about the “princess” and are shielding Yuzu from Akihiro's slow swipes.

Ichigo laughs. “No.” He stands up. “I came to ask if you wanted to come to a party with me.”

“A party?”

“I could use a date, if Akihiro's okay with it.”

Chad considers. “I don't own a suit.”

“Doesn't matter if you show up naked,” Ichigo says. “I still can't think of anyone I'd trust more to watch my back.”

“It's that kind of party?”

“I've got a feeling.”

Chad slowly puts his hands on his knees, the round muscles of his shoulders tipping towards his neck to kiss lightly, catching the fabric of his yukata between them. It folds a line of stress that trails down his back before it dissipates in the robe somewhere around his waist. He's thicker than he was when Ichigo last saw him, body still familiar in its bulk, but pushing now the kind of obvious strength that would make 11 th squad trainees back away nervously. And yet he makes sense here more than inside the walls; for all his talent with his fists, Chad has always been more like Kazui than Ichigo.

It's one of the reasons Ichigo has never worried about him the way he does Ishida.

Chad takes his time getting to his feet. One of the kids below looks up and waves at him; he waves back before turning away from the edge of the hill. 

“It's good to see you, Ichigo,” Chad says. “You seem more yourself.”

“I take it back,” Ichigo says. “Don't show up naked. Pretty certain Byakuya would have a heart attack.”

“I'll keep it in mind.”

****

Ichigo goes back up on the hill by himself before he and Yuzu have to leave that evening. The sun sinks drunkenly across the false sky and he sits in the grass, taking measure of the puddle that has swollen to a sea in his chest. His heart is still floating steady; it's found neither ground or a whirlpool. Yhwach will not appear to ruin this moment. 

He breathes out a long exhale into the dusk, relieved beyond words.

“Are you looking for her?” 

Ichigo turns to see Yuichi standing a few metres away, his hands open at his sides. He somehow looks like a parakeet still even as a man. 

“Who?” Ichigo asks. Black hair flashes in his mind; orange comes second. 

“Your mother,” Yuichi says.

The pictures in Ichigo's head fall away.

“I come up here to look for mine,” Yuichi says. “We've brought so many people together, but not me and her, not yet.” He pauses, then, “I recognize it in you.”

“She wouldn't be here,” Ichigo says. “A hollow—”

After a moment, Yuichi nods.

“But you're looking anyway.”

The wind kicks up a sweet smell, almost akin to the cherry blossoms in the Kuchiki gardens. Three suns glow in Ichigo's mind, one in the Seireitei, the others close together, somewhere out in Rukongai, beyond the horizon. 

His mother spent most of her time with his father in laughter—at him and with him and just around him like a soft, warm cloak hanging from her shoulders for a knee-high Ichigo to grab at and rub his palms across. It's what Ichigo remembers best about them both, when he thinks about it.

Rukia never had any of that, even for a small time. She had this hill and Renji.

“Your brother, the surrogate one,” Ichigo says. “Is he still around, or did you guys part ways in your original division when you went looking for your mom?”

“Horiuchi came with me,” Yuichi says. “He doesn't remember having brothers or sisters or parents from his human life, but it's okay, 'cause he's got me. We're family.”

Ichigo smiles despite himself.

“I hope you find yours again,” Yuichi says. “You're one of the good shinigami. You should be happy.”

Yuichi rocks gently from side to side when he makes his way back down the hill, like a marionette. He's a good kid—he doesn't deserve to hear that Ichigo is more likely to find his mother in Soul Society than happiness. He doesn't deserve what would happen if Ichigo did.

****

The sun has disappeared by the time he gets back within the walls. He used a Senkeimon to get Yuzu and him back after they ate food with Chad and Akihiro, and was able to drop Yuzu off just outside her and Karin's place. He doesn't use them often; seeing those bamboo gates still just reminds him of having people taken away.

Yuzu hugs him at the door, tells him, “take care of Rukia-nee.”

His feet take him slowly over the rooftops, at the same pace as his heart. He means to head straight home, his thoughts on his bed, but as he's passing the Kuchiki manor, he sees a light on in one room.

Ichigo stops.

The moon has fallen from the sky; she's on a pedestal in front of a panel of windows, facing away from him. Half of her hair pours down her back, the other half pinned up on the side of her head with a jewelled clip, and she's wearing a formal kimono, silver and pale purple, obi tucked haphazardly as though an attendant had been dismissed in the middle of helping her fit it. She looks as though she is the source of all of the soft light in the room.

She draws her haori over her shoulders, and it does nothing to dim the glow. When she turns her head, Ichigo can see that she's been crying.

She stands there for a long time, her hands curled up to her shoulders, before she gathers her skirts and steps down to leave the room, the woman in white.

Ichigo, unfelt, wobbles home like a drunk, the sky empty above him.

He dreams of nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> next is the climax of the story! or even more extended buildup to the climax, because...me...but for sure we've got sketchy takahashi's party next!


End file.
